Technology giant Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) has been betting aggressively on the growth of artificial intelligence in recent years. This has come at the expense of eliminating jobs in the company's metaverse segment and spending less time on the areas that CEO Mark Zuckerberg once bet the company's name on.
Job cuts for the metaverse division may have been only for that division as the company is now making major changes to Horizon Worlds, a social VR platform.
Meta announced the changes in a recent blog post. According to Quartz, Facebook's parent company is killing off the metaverse after losing $80 billion.
Meta will remove Horizon Worlds from Quest headsets by June 15, with the app gone by end of March. The game will become a mobile app after the changes and see less focus on from Meta Platforms.
While the company is making changes to Horizon Worlds, Meta is not giving up on VR with plans to release more VR hardware and Ray-Ban smart glasses that focus more on AI than virtual worlds.
At 2024 Meta Connect, Zuckerberg said the company was "getting closer to achieving the dream of Reality Labs."
Many Meta shareholders likely disagree after watching the Reality Labs segment bleed cash for years as an unprofitable venture.
The good news for Meta shareholders is the stock has performed well even with the Reality Labs losses, dating back to before the company changed its name from Facebook to Meta Platforms.
Meta Name Change
Meta's heavy bet on the metaverse reached new heights nearly five years ago when the company formerly changed its name to Meta Platforms on Oct. 29, 2021.
"Connection is evolving and so are we," the company said at the time. "The metaverse is the next evolution of social connection. Our company's vision is to help bring the metaverse to life, so we are changing our name to reflect our commitment to this future."
Zuckerberg announced the name change at the Facebook Connect event in 2021.
"To reflect who we are and what we hope to build, I am proud to announce that starting today, our company is now Meta," Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg said from that moment on the company would be "metaverse-first, not Facebook-first."
The company changed its name to Meta Platforms and eventually changed its stock ticker from FB to MVRS. In 2022, the company announced it would change its ticker from MVRS to the current META.
Investing $1,000 in FB Stock
Trading as ticker FB at the time, shares traded at around $325.52 on Oct. 28, 2021, when the rebranding and new company focus were announced.
A $1,000 investment in Facebook shares could have bought 3.07 shares then. Today, the $1,000 investment would be worth $1,867.48, up 86.7% over the last four and a half years.
For comparison, investing in the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSE: SPY), which tracks the S&P 500 Index, would have performed worse. A $1,000 investment in the SPY at the time would be worth $1,440.63 today, up 44.1%.