Zuckerberg's Facebook Burns $500 Billion Becoming 'Meta'. Are They In Trouble?

Slashdot reader McGruber shares a scathing column from New York magazine arguing that "There has never been a self-immolation quite like Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg's social-media company has lost more than half a trillion dollars in market value since its August peak — about half of that vaporized in a single day, the biggest drop ever — as it starts to weaken from the constant siege of competitors and dissenters without and within.

Meta, once the sixth-largest company in the world by market cap, has fallen out of the top ten, replaced by two computer chip makers and a Chinese e-commerce company.

They're calling it "an ignominious fall from a rarefied group of world-dominating companies." Facebook's once unbeatable ad-tracking system — the engine that made it a more than $1 trillion company — has effectively been neutralized by the likes of Apple, which allows users to block the company's trackers. (Google is set to start phasing in similar protections to its users over the next two years.) Facebook's user base has started to shrink after revelations by whistleblowers and leaks that showed how harmful social media could be to teen users, who are flocking to less toxic competitors like TikTok anyway. And Zuckerberg — clearly bored with the company he founded 18 years ago — has shifted his vision into an immersive version of the internet, complete with headsets and digital avatars, that he calls the metaverse, an ambition that sets up Facebook's competition not with another Silicon Valley company but with reality itself....

The decision by Apple and Google to allow their users to disabling code that tracks people across the internet is a good one for their business model. According to The Wall Street Journal, advertisers are shifting their entire ad budgets to Google since Facebook is no longer profitable.

The article's final point is that in the middle of all this, Zuckerberg has committed the company to a "metaverse" future — even though Wall Street investors seem almost unanimously unconvinced. "Clearly, Zuckerberg has plenty of money to burn on his ambitions, but what's less clear is if he'll be able to bring back the armies of people who once believed in his ability to conquer the world."