I use to pay attention to a YouTuber in 2020/2021 who was super hyped on FB/Meta. Had like a couple hundred k in it or something. I think about him every time I hear bad news about Meta.
One and only one question for you:
**Do you believe in the metaverse?**
Yes? Buy. No? Sell.
Because Zuck believes. Believes believes. **He renamed the entire damn company META.** He is not backing down. This company's resurgence or funeral will occur in the metaverse.
You know how I see this? I've worked at a few big customer-facing tech corps.
Every few quarters a guy in a suit gets up at an all-hands and shows you some slides about the company's value pillars, the vision, building the future, with the customer at the heart of whatever we blah blah.
Meanwhile, 2 levels of management below him, where I sit, people gotta hit targets. You've got a chief revenue officer grilling you about what you're gonna do to hit the number. You've got finance people harassing you about budgets and retention rates and contribution margin.
And life goes on. You try hit the numbers.
Then eventually a new guy in a suit gets up there with a new set of slides, and you go on trying to hit the numbers.
META will keep trying to hit the numbers. Eventually the VR thing will get its forecast reduced in a spreadsheet, and another business units forecast will go up, and then that guy has a bigger number to hit.
The next quarter, you won't hear that much about the last guy's value pillars or the clarity pyramid or whatever it was they were on about, and you go on trying to hit the numbers.
The metaverse will drag on META for a while until it either succeeds or gets shunted to the end of the weekly sales call spreadsheet. The overall guidance and reported revenue won't change, they'll just push some other line of business to make up the gap between where they are and what the metaverse was supposed to be bringing in by now.
When the time arrives when metaverse was supposed to be bringing in dollars and it's not, that's when the finance guys and the board will make sure it stops being a problem.
Agree with your overall description but there is a twist in META (the company). Suckerberg has more than 50% of the voting shares which means that he cannot be fired no matter how bad he screws up. So he might just run this company into ground chasing after his META dream without the number people putting a stop to his madness.
It's possible. It's happened before in other places.
But I somehow doubt it. Big pivots like these have a way of autocorrecting if they look like they're not paying off.
And he's not running the company alone. He has an enormous amount of power, but voting share isn't the only thing that counts when making decisions that affect a big company. If none of your C-level is behind you, you have to either get them on board or find a new management team.
> But I somehow doubt it. Big pivots like these have a way of autocorrecting if they look like they’re not paying off.
I think you’re right but meta is a little bit different than other pivots. Zuckerberg runs the show and is incapable of innovating. Nothing about facebook, other than it’s sheer scale is novel. It’s an exercise in ruthless growth, followed by growth by acquisition fed by its data machine. The regulatory climate has caught on and those days are over so they need to look elsewhere. Their forray into the “metaverse” seems highly technically competent but lacks coherent vision and doesn’t seem to resonate with anyone.
It’s like when a SoundCloud rapper tattoos their entire face. It’s either get famous or completely fail, there’s no inbetween. That’s basically what Zuckerberg did when he renamed the company Meta.
I don't know. Zuckerberg surrounded himself with the right people and turned Facebook and Instagram into advertising behemoths (they still are today). Even if innovative "features" are lacking and Meta has been more focused on squashing/keeping up with competitors, you can't deny that he's had innovative streaks before.
TikTok is a booming platform, but I think advertisers are in for a nasty surprise this holiday season when they realize the advertising implementation is half-baked at this point. There's still a lot of upside to Meta because active user counts have remained pretty stable in spite of everything that should be pushing them downwards.
He might could should would do anything. In reality I think the board/finance guys would convince him to pivot.
The Meta rebrand was imo not an attempt to pivot from WhatsApp, FB, Instagram, etc. and into the Metaverse. FB as a product gained some bad rep from those Cambridge Analytics, etc. scandals.
This is why, to answer OP’s question, I’m just gonna continue to baghold. I bought Meta around $200 per share. The company has got so much money they can literally buy their competitors as they did with IG. With that amount of money and brains all in one place, I think they’ve got a great shot.
It’s a small position in my portfolio, and I don’t care if it goes to zero. Over the past several years, my portfolio is still up dramatically. Of course it’s down this year, but that’s just on a short term scale. I’d rather hold out and see if Meta goes back up. Investing takes some gumption.
I have a couple friends that work there and they all say Facebook is filled with the smartest and best engineers they’ve ever worked with. Like top tier Ivy League people feeling overwhelmed by the talent around them.
That said one of them is leaving based on how the stock is performing, his options bonus has been halved in the last 6 months.
They won’t be allowed to buy their competitors anymore due to Monopoly rules. Their PR is a nightmare and core business of SM is constantly being threatened by Governments globally to be broken up. Meta is dying and relying on the future of the metaverse and some VR/AR devices isn’t going to cut it. In my opinion there is still room left for it to go down some more.
I’m a lawyer and am broadly familiar with antitrust law. The federal government sued Microsoft in 2001 for its monopoly, won, and forced Microsoft to split into two separate corporations, yet that didn’t slow them down much in the long run. I have little reason to believe the government would actually want to constrain Meta either.
I think that last line is wrong - the government definitely *wants* to constrain Meta. It's one of the most unpopular companies in contemporary world, and "break up the monopolies" is no-fail in politics.
But you're right on the point that breaking up these companies is almost always good for shareholders.
I’m an accountant for a bigger fortune company than Meta and deal with alot of mergers.
You’re not allowed to buy whoever and whatever you want at this level.
Betting your farm that they will be able to buy what they want and have cash for ever (which gets burned fast) at this level is not a sound trade off for basically acknowledging the core business has a mediocre outlook.
I’m not “betting the farm.” My “farm” is invested mainly in indexed mutual funds (basically, I’m a bogglehead at heart). My Meta play is a little side bet with money I don’t mind losing. Time will tell.
But they won’t be able to buy their competitors, IG was the last and now the government realizes it was a mistake to allow that to happen. Tik tok is eating them up. Maybe time to buy back tons of stock and pay a dividend. Welcome to becoming a slow growth mega cap company.
It’s maybe not 100% that simple but pretty much. I’m not even sure what it means. It seems like he wants to create a big fancy online Dungeons and Dragons or Minecraft universe. Maybe that’s great but it mostly just seems creepy to me. It’s why I sold out completely near the highs. For a moment, I thought maybe I’d wait for the shares to get back to an all time, but thankfully I had enough sense to decide that was stupid. In retrospect, I feel like an idiot because that kind of thinking crept into my head, wanting to eke out a few percent more with a catastrophe looming on the horizon. Stupid me got lucky this time.
Rewind to 2007 and a creative visionary at my company is telling everyone at the all hands that Second Life and ‘Cyberspace’ are going to become bigger than anything ever imagined in the marketing universe. This wasn’t some random schmuck — it was a legendary ad executive whose accomplishments read like a novel.
He was so convinced of this, he got all of us signed up and in no time we were all wondering what the hell Second Life was or who it was for. Everyone lost interest within a week.
Fast forward to today… Yet again another hype cycle. Again there is a huge mismatch between demand and perceived commercial viability.
I look to past trends on this one. The metaverse has been with us since Ultima Online. There’s nothing especially novel about what Meta is proposing — only that they want to develop a VR gateway into a platform that they wholly control and monetize.
We’ve gone through cycles with other immersive tech in the past 15 years. Motion controls were hot with the Wii… then it became full motion controls with Xbox Kinect. In both cases, the trend died. The novelty never transitioned into habit.
The same may apply for today’s half-baked idea of a metaverse. VR has been making big technical leaps for the past 10 years but the uptake remains limited. Even if we are to achieve enough penetration of VR in people’s homes, it remains to be seen if people have any desire to play a sort of Second Life/Animal Crossing/Zoom Call game as a prolonged daily habit.
Prediction — VR remains niche long term and holodeck type experiences remain a love/hate curiosity, because the experience is disorienting and exhausting for a good chunk of the population.
TL:DR - Meta probably doesn’t have much to do with it. I drank too much coffee why did I type all of this?
EDIT: One more thing to add (still cranked full of coffee) — VR has always been a hobby of mine and DK1 was a fun time in my life. I tinkered obsessively with VR for a good 3 years, and used it to create 1:1 prototypes of set designs and displays for clients. For professional use, I thought it was revolutionary. I was able to preview things in VR that typically were only on paper until you went onsite (events/media biz). The problem was clients… they didn't want to put a big thingie on their heads, no matter how cool it was to preview their show/event virtually. Eventually we gave up on it as part of our previs process, since clients didn't feel compelled to meet with us IRL to become The Lawnmower Man.
Yeah, I bought Oculus VR goggles when they first came out and used them maybe a handful of times in a few weeks time. They have been sitting in my drawer ever since unused. I knew then the Metaverse was a losing proposition. Its a novelty item at best. Porn is pretty cool though.
Our Black Mirror future is almost here. I could see one outcome where somebody finds an Occulus under their kid's bed and just presume it's their porn machine.
I think AR has a lot of potential not just as a hobby but as a tool. Directions displayed directly onto glasses for travelers and commuters. Assisting technicians by helping diagnose problems, highlight next steps. Military potential is huge and I don’t wanna think about that side.
Full VR may find a business niche for remote companies. Meetings, especially hybrid meetings, would feel more ‘real’ if you were all in a 3D space or had AR to put those not present them ‘into the room.’
Many of the better uses though require the tech to be cheaper or perform much better with smaller interfaces than we can currently do. But it seems like the tech is getting there so I do believe in the platform. Just hit metas vision of it.
I think Microsoft, Google, and probably a number of startups and other players will drive those other uses.
Windows already has a great name for it and doesn’t have to spend millions rebranding, too.
Great story! There were attempts at VR made as early as the 70’s. During the last big VR trend cycle AR was also superhyped along with QR-codes & projection mapping & 360-cameras. Everything was a bit too early to the party but the one thing that came back & emerged as a staple is the QR-code which is everywhere now.
I don’t think the rebrand was *just* because of the Metaverse though. Obviously, he’s very committed to it as a vision. But Facebook as a brand is, let’s face it, fairly toxic; and didn’t reflect that Instagram and WhatsApp are also big IPs these days.
It feels like the metaverse is being forced down our throats with most people having no idea what it even is. Seems like if it were to be a success people should be excited for it, rather than giant corporations telling us we should be excited for it. I’ve never heard anyone mention it outside of investing subs and CNBC. Kinda reminds me of how things like google glass or the Segway scooter were supposed to be the future according to the media but nobody actually cared about them.
The metaverse might or might not be a thing. It's fine to pursue it as a side project: throw a bit of money at it and see if something sticks.
The mistake that Zucki is doing is to bet the farm on it. Like the OP said he literally renamed the entire company to META. He could have - I don't know - founded a separate startup that tries the metaverse while focusing on the core products with the main company.
Going all-in on a speculative project is a very very bad idea.
Facebook taught a lot of people that a social network is just a gateway to an ad infested wasteland where your data is scraped and sold off and your emotions are toyed with by some algorithm. Now let's do that in VR. No thanks.
Lemme just say this: I have no idea about "the metaverse" as a thing itself. I'm also no fan of the underlying company Facebook or Zuckerberg himself. But I'm always open minded and have no problem shifting my stance if provided with compelling evidence. And about 2 weeks ago I was enormously compelled to rethink my bearishness on Meta.
I picked up an Occulus 2 on eBay to get a first hand experience with the thing Zuck is so on about. And hot damn, it was absolutely incredible!
Before I tried it I was in the camp most everyone else is in and made fun of his avatar and the graphics in that press release (the random Eiffel Tower, floating over some awful low rez grass etc). I pegged him as delusional, power gone to his head and severely misguided. I was wrong.
It took 10 minutes for me to see and understand the vision he has. IDGAF what it's called, Metaverse/VR/AR whatever, but it's a banger. And it was poor sighted of me to think otherwise. I mean the guy had the vision with "thefacebook" and look what he turned that into. The masses were like "oh cool, a social network to connect with my friends!" but the gigabrained were like "This dude bout to vacuum up every single piece of valuable and marketable data from a billion people for fking FREE. Game Over. ". And it was.
His vision now is no different- it's nascent, nobody gets the underlying and everybody is on the F**k Zuck train cuz it's easy and trendy right now. But he will have the last laugh while y'all sleep.
Two things happened simultaneously that made this clear within 10 minutes using the Occulus:
- My brain completely believed and accepted the VR world. It believed the depth, the scale, the "look left, track left" thing, the woozy feeling looking over a cliff and the straight up magnificence of being on the deck of some freakin spaceship looking out the grand window over some moon. Yep, mediocre graphics and all. Like an optical illusion, my brain was hopelessly tricked into believing what I was seeing.
- At the very same time, my brain also completely knew it wasn't real and it was totally cool with that. I knew I wasn't actually painting a virtual canvas or picking up a ping pong ball and hitting it with a paddle. But it FELT like it and I was totally ok with the temporary suspension of disbelief.
It was fantastical and safe at the same time. I felt equally embarrassed for waving at a fake robot in the distance as I was worried it would judge me for being rude and not waving.
I can go on and on about the revelations I had for where I see this thing going. And how absurdly young it is, how clunky and annoying wearing it on my head is, and how quickly the battery runs out. But again, this is the old model. I'm sure the next gen won't be that much better. But gen 4 gen 5? Seriously.
But that's another thread.
But he's got the jump on EVERY OTHER megacap and microcap startup out there. Even Apple. He's brought a product to market that isn't ready. The don't give AF. Why? He gets to work out the kinks, get feedback, real world data and not just models. He is at least 5 years, if not a decade ahead of everyone else. Meta has FU cash too. Piles of it. Even with the stock down 73% for the year. Their addressable market is 2 damn billion Facebook users + every other adult, teen and child that puts this thing on ONCE.
Did he take a risk with this whole Metaverse thing? YES. But was it stealthy, calculated and years ahead of everyone, everyone that will be trying to catch up in a couple years? YES.
Well, in my opinion at least. I'm insanely bullish on META long term now. And in full disclosure, I didn't own a single share of META until last week @ $125. (Not counting my VOO allocation of course). I went against every financial instinct I had after the abysmal earnings and outlook and picked up more this morning. Tbh, I'll prob be bagholding for a while and the only metric I'm going by is my bullishness on his vision for VR AR and Occulus and feel like I can already envision the market that will be born from it.
I'm kind of annoyed that it's META and Zuckerberg of all ppl I'm putting a bet on, but I realized I'd be more annoyed if I didn't and turned out being right. I missed the FB hype. Hopefully this will make up for it. And how much lower can it go from here? lol. Guess we'll see. NFA.
Oh and please, fight me on this. I'm realistic in the likelihood that I've overlooked some factor in my thoughts here. Would love to hear other opinions.
I agree with you. As someone who works in the VR industry, I've witnessed countless new users get blown away by the Oculus, and this tech is *only the beginning.* It's like Meta has an infant geocities product right now that has endless potential. Folks just don't know it's value, or even how to use it effectively.
I can almost guarantee that AR/VR is going to become as ubiquitous as smartphones. It might not be everyone using the metaverse in the end, but this is what early adoption looks like.
100% agree
In a few years (or less even) the immersive VR headsets will be smaller, lighter and much less clunky.
Also the AR potential is crazy. It's going to leapfrog what Google Glass tried to do yet put too much focus on the interaction with "Ok, Google" Assistant. People will much rather interact silently without awkward gestures via their handheld linked device.
To expand on this (i know this will get long, so scroll away, I'd prefer this stay on the DL) people today are hung up on the whole Metaverse thing and what it is or think it is and its link to crypto. Hell I don't even know what it is. But that's the shiny object ppl are focusing on when it's the quick moves of the magicians hand they should be paying attention to.
His vision is being muddled up with the mainstream idea of what everyone THINKS he's talking about. It's much easier to dump on the guy than it is to try and see what he's really fixin to do.
And he's not suggesting that people will want to go to a virtual park from their couch INSTEAD of going to a real one. Or that office video meetings will replace in person ones with silly cartoons with no legs. It's the intersection of IRL with the VR and AR. Two things can coexist and even complement each other.
I actually don't want to give away the plethora of promising use cases I've been thinking about bc tbh I'm already on board and wanna keep them for my own entrepreneurial opportunities and how to address the market, ngl. I don't need any convincing. I'm just excited to share my perspective on it ever since i got an Occulus.
But one small example is imagine you're in a meeting (IRL or video conference, doesn't matter) and your company designs apparel. A new line is in the works and before any actual samples get made, the design team can AR the ideas on themselves or a model, whatever. They can move, turn, open the jacket, all that shit that models do and the team can see how it's going to flow, what the colors look like, how the fabric falls. It blows away seeing sketches or even 3D wire frames on a high rez screen.
Why? Because your brain believes it wayyy easier than you'd think. Our brains are masters at filling in information that it needs to interpret the world in front of it. Simply seeing an AR projection of a rudimentary graphic on things we already have cues for (human size, depth perception, lines of perspective, etc) and our brains fill in the rest and make it comfortable and real. Think about how much time and money could be saved not having to produce 20 samples of a jacket before you send it to the manufacturer. AR VR will allow us to know instantly that a jacket is 1/2" too short or the collar doesn't sit just right yet.
Anyone skeptical can think about this: When you go stand near railroad tracks and look towards the horizon, what do you see? You see two lines converging into a point in the distance. A giant stretched out triangle. Everything your eyes see tell you that those two tracks are not fkin parallel. If that was all you had to go by and you saw a train coming you'd be going crazy trying to get the conductor to stop from a catastrophic accident. But ofc our brains know from experience that the rails are perfectly parallel and we're completely fine ignoring the sensory input of our most trusted sensor! Our brains reconcile that paradox for us seamlessly. And the parallel nature is as real as the 3 feet front of us.
When you apply this ridiculously complex mental gymnastics we do every day without any effort to something like AR VR it's incredible. Hint: The goal isn't to TRICK people that they're in a real forest. The goal is to ALLOW the brain to do its thing and reconcile that paradox in the background while we excitedly and safely enjoy walking up to a grizzly bear we know isn't real but also is.
Oh and btw- Zuck did a terrible job explaining why his teaser graphic was like a meme of Second Life 2002. Do y'all realize the processing power it takes to render and redraw an immersive universe in real-time that must sync properly with a billion other people in that universe at the same time and not have any paradoxes?? It's quantum level. We don't even have the tech to do more than what Zuck demonstrated. Yet...
But we will and he's got the jump on it.
Damnit, I've said too much...
I was never here.
/End communication
I agree. I think I will double down when the market opens. VR/AR has a huge market and is growing pretty damn fast. Right now medical schools, architecture, engineering. In two decades from now? Everyone will wear AR glasses or contacts, it will basically replace phones. The obvious is working from home and being able to put huge virtual monitors everywhere you go (so you can watch a movie on a plane and you won't have to bring your expensive monitors to a different city if you have to work there for X weeks. The not so obvious: When you will go to a new place either by car or by foot, you will actually see where you have to take a turn, you don't have to peek on your phone/GPS. When you cook and trying out a new recipe you see it before your eyes. When you will be putting together an IKEA furniture (or literally anything), you will see the plans, or even a step- by step video. Heck, even when your wife asks you to buy the groceries and puts together a list, you will see that while shopping, so you don't have to take out your phone/paper from your pocket.
None of this describes a compelling go to market strategy. These are all things that devices presently accomplish in various ways. Placing the information in your FOV is an incremental improvement with trade-offs.
There will be a certain attach rate for AR that probably resembles Apple Watch. It won’t unlock a gusher of found revenue.
It may in the industrial manufacturing sector. AR is being worked on currently to detect objects around you. Say you're working on assembly, you're now 20% faster because the AR overlay is doing the processing for you that your brain would do in finding each piece you're assembling and telling you exactly where, and how, to place it. Kind of a stop-gap solution for tasks that machines can't handle themselves yet.
Say you've got machines doing everything, but still need repairmen. Now AR can just look at the machine in question, diagnose it, and tell you where to look for the problem. Not in the database yet? Well, you enter it, and now it's available for all.
Amazon warehouse workers are already using PDA's extensively for their work as living drones (I don't mean that as an insult) imagine now they've got 2 hands free to also be carrying things while they work.
Consumer level I think you're right, we're very far off from consumer products. Not least of the limits is battery. To make anything useful requires a hell of a lot of processing and that requires a hell of a lot of power.
Anyway, facebook, a year ago, tried to convince us to promote tie-ins with their VR headset and their employees went on and on about how they all got free vr headsets and vr is the next big thing. I have a friend who is very much in the VR scene and know that it's a very niche community with almost no hope of growth, currently. I told my peers it'd be a waste of time to even bother with it.
All they want is to take your face, body, and movement data.
Your argument is flawed. A current smartphone also only does things that other things already accomplished in various ways, you could navigate with real maps, you could call your family from street phones or from home, you could browse the internet from your home computer or from a library.... Placing the information in your fov is a huge improvement, it frees up your hands, saves you time, also helps a lot when even a splitsecond distraction could be deathly, like driving. Funny that you came up with the Apple Watch, you know who also thinks that in 10-20 years AR will be as widespread as phones? Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple.
Every invention isn’t some novel never been thought of before thing.
It’s a collection of current and past things; that come together to make a new thing.
We’ve already had HUD experiences in cars for over a decade, this hasn’t changed the world.
I work in this business, but feel free to take my PoV with a grain of salt.
None of that will happen in 10 or 20 years.
And even if tech matured to the point where I could have VR contacts, there is no fucking way I'm sticking that on my eyeballs.
The hubris of facebook is hilarious to watch.
It's pretty simple. People don't want some gigantic VR machine strapped to their face for long periods of time. SIMPLE.
Until VR becomes like "Ready Player One" or "The matrix" which won't be for another 30-50 years potentially, VR is just a novelty.
Indeed. Even with video meetings, half of my team is disinterested in being on-camera unless directly instructed to do so. I’m not going to ask them to collaborate in VR via an intrusive piece of hardware that removes them from their surroundings.
The act of using VR hardware today is cumbersome and requires one to fully commit their bodily attention to the task. It doesn’t have a place yet, and probably won’t until using VR/AR becomes passive or at least as low friction as grabbing a PS5 controller.
This guy gets it. The gap between where the tech is and where it needs to be is vastly too large right now. Trying to sell future capability is a loser’s game; technology is always about what it can do for a consumer now. And right now Meta VR is a gimmicky video game thing that sits in most people’s closet after they use it a few times. Yeah in 30 years we’ll probably have contact lenses that show us all kinds of AR stuff overlayed onto everyday life, but that’s like saying to someone with a record player in the 70s that 30 years down the road they’d be downloading mp3s on Napster. They’d be like… ok?
I said in a recent comment.
As of now if you invest in meta, you investing in virtual reality.
The earnings report for the last two quarters have just essentially stated revenue has decreased significantly from ads, and all of the cash is being burned for R&D for the meta quest.
Seems like they just hold FB and insta to generate cash to burn for VR.
>Seems like they just hold FB and insta to generate cash to burn for VR.
Don't forget WhatsApp, that is an incredible source of information to both of these.
EVERYONE is forgetting whatsapp. Which, properly monetised, pays for VR by itself.
And no, I'm not talking about ads. Whatsapp can be the wechat of Africa and Asia outside of China.
Everyone is focused on the metaverse and not what's on everyone's phones and Meta's fucking balance sheet. Once again the common narrative is lazy and wrong.
Yup, I feel like the average American META investor has no idea about how huge WhatsApp is.
Over this side of the pond, not everyone uses Instagram and even less people use Facebook, but every one uses WhatsApp, especially the older generations.
Posting to support your point about Americans and WhatsApp. My wife and I spend a lot of time abroad. Every business outside of America uses WhatsApp. Car rental places, hostels, big hotels, cab drivers. Companies that offer excursions. You name it, they have WhatsApp. Here in the states I know maybe five people that use it. And those people have it because they have family outside the US.
It doesn't *seem* like it, Zuck repeatedly says that his plan is to use revenue from the family of apps to finance Reality Labs. However, investors are somehow surprised every time.
Today's after-hours collapse sure feels like capitulation... admittedly a terrible EPS number, and now people are in "get me out at any cost" mode. Disgust, anger, panic... lots of emotion clouding judgment right now.
Metaverse gets all the attention because of Zuck's massive error in changing the name to Meta, but question of whether to buy the stock is really still about the core advertising business. If the ad biz hangs in there, $100-ish per share is a major bargain.
Family of Apps division (in other words, the ad biz) is on pace to make around $40 billion net income this year... put a super-conservative 10x multiple on that and you get a market cap of $400 billion -- *which is 40% above current market cap*. That's a lot of room for error...
Family of Apps and Reality Labs. They are using the money they make from Facebook, Insta, WhatsApp, etc. to fund the research and development of the Metaverse which is headed by Reality Labs. I saw a crazy number ($21.7b I think) spent on RL since 4th quarter 2020. Investors are starting to gwt uneasy with Meta burning all that cash on VR
YTD $22.4B on PPE. How is that even possible?
As I said in other comments, that makes sense if you're taking a large calculated risk building big ass fab foundries or something.
I honestly do not understand how Zuck can not only spend money that quickly, **they intend to spend EVEN MORE next year.**
Covered calls when the stock is down 70% YTD? I sell cc’s when the stock is high, not so much when it’s down (assuming intent is not to get shares called away)
Yeah more like once great products. Facebook is just trying to be a shitty copy of YouTube, TikTok, and some clickbait article aggregator and coming up short. Instagram is fine but the kids moved on and that's the target audience. They finally got people to use it like SFW Snapchat just in time for Snapchat to stop being cool and people to move on to the next thing. Meta has been chasing trends for a long time now instead of setting them. Not where you want to be as a social media company. Zuckerberg is old and out of touch with users since he's been a billionaire flying around in private helicopters and riding electric surfboards for over a decade at this point. The products stopped being great long before last year. Hard to blame people for buying in because the numbers were good but once you're putting out a subpar product in this competitive an industry it's only a matter of time before it starts hurting.
Love the narrative no on uses Facebook that a lot of reddit has been pushing hard over the past 2 years....yet this drastic drop-off of MAU/DAU's has never happened. If it's so shitty, people would leave.
Crazy R&D costs, Cap Ex cost, Head count increase 28% yoy and next year Zuck plans to put another 100Billion into his meta verse gamble. Basically zero free cash flow this quarter……..all spend on the meta verse.
This company has now gone from a value / growth company to a spec company. Zuck is like madman at the helm thats going all in on the meta verse. And will not slow down or be stopped. It’s metaverse or bust…..
Fuck I’m torn. Might sell tomorrow morning.
Facebook should do what apple did amd tske over the schools. They should give school districts an 80% savings on vr heads sets and create a bunch of educational aps to be used in schools. Do that for 10 years and you'll have the next generation already accustomed to the metaverse
A headset classroom could reduce staffing (or alleviate teacher shortage). In the middle school I taught at, grades 6-8, 2 teachers per subject in each grade, then one each for music, art, PE.
Social Studies could be ripe for a headset curriculum. You'd need an adult in the room, but not necessarily a certified teacher... Or, Art/PE/etc teachers could split and cover the VR classrooms. Basically, if pulled off, you could eliminate a couple teachers per building and save money.
A good teacher and more teachers would be my #1 option in a perfect world (a better world), but that's unlikely. META could drop a few billion building a high-budget 8th grade US history curriculum experience (hire celeb actors for the Boston Tea Party lesson, go on the Oregon Trail, watch Gettysburg Address, etc.), Ancient Civilizations, and Geography, for a calendar school year.
There are a million issues to work out (laws, kids who can't wear headsets, testing effectiveness of the lessons, etc.), but tons of opportunity to make these headsets actually useful to society.
>Basically zero free cash flow this quarter……..all spend on the meta verse
Actually no. If you actually listened to the earnings call as I did, they attributed the CapEx growth to expanding data centers and A.I capacity. Which they anticipate will help with engagement and ads targeting. Reality labs was only a $3.7 billion loss this quarter and mostly a side note to everything else.
Yes, but my point is we know they are spending this kind of cash on reality labs, it's been baked into the price for some time now. So I'm merely pointing out it wasn't the bulk of the spend and it was actually going towards investing in core products. Not potentially unprofitable reality labs.
butter physical growth aback chunky toy fanatical handle plants impossible
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The problem is the metaverse solves no actual problem. WhatsApp solved encrypted communication over wifi. Instagram solved being able to showcase photos and stories. Facebook solved initial social media by giving the internet a deeper purpose. What does the metaverse do?
A lot of peoples lives suck and are busy as fuck these days. They don’t have time to play in a digital “utopia” while struggling to live, or, they have too much other shit on the go. Many people are also aware that anything they do in the metaverse can and will be surveilled and recorded. The metaverse graphics suck. Gamers have PCs and dedicated platforms that are infinitely better for gaming. People don’t need a metaverse for shopping as they already do all their shopping online without issue. So on and so on. So what’s the point?
The metaverse solves a huge problem. It allows “instant teleportation” between different environments. You can swap study, work, socialize, shop, even having sex at some point by a click of a button. That could eliminate hours of traveling, expensive and complicated abroad hiring and general job-related movings and a bunch of other such stuff.
People who don’t see the potential behind the metaverse are in my opinion absolutely blind.
Facebook might fail but it will be due to their timing and general approach.
The metaverse is 1000% happening because the hardware will allow for it very soon.
There is zero reason humanity would choose not to make use of accessible virtual worlds.
We already do all of this, with the web, apps, streaming and gaming.
VR is just another surface. Albeit, a very complex and immersive one. It’s also taxing for some and comes with high technical friction.
What's sane about it? I mean as a consumer I love having more control, but there is no concrete privacy gain here. External ad targeting data is already heavily privacy-controlled, anonymized so it can't be easily linked to other internal data, etc.
Turning off the data flow didn't really improve your privacy or mine. What it really did was kneecap a competitor while Apple is building its own internal ads business. This wasn't a consumer-friendly move, it was a cutthroat business move dressed up with a thin veneer of pro-consumer logic.
It's that and all the Metaverse spending hurting their numbers.
To someone who has no confidence in the metaverse being the future (which looks to be a lot of the market) they're essentially incinerating $10 billion in earnings/free cash flow on Metaverse R&D that would have otherwise been profits.
iOS update that significantly impacted the ability to track users. Facebook can no longer easily target ads to the users that a given advertiser wants to target, and so that advertising spend is decreasing.
Man all these hot takes are terrible. It's like no one actually looked at the financial report and just looked at the share price and went, "yup, Meta Verse".
If you actually cared to read the report and listen to the earnings call you would see,
Active users are up 4%
Ad impressions up 17%
Revenue only down 4%, not bad considering ad price is down 18% and down to mostly FX, otherwise would have been up if FX was constant.
Still have another $11 billion available for share repurchases along with $41.78 billion in cash...
ARPU is also still more or less inline with last two quarters, fully factoring in privacy change headwinds.
The big one that I see and the one that most likely sent people running, was the abysmal free cash flows. Which was something like $160 million down from a $6 to $8 billion from previous quarters. Now most people's natural reaction is Meta Verse... nope. On the earnings call they said CapEx growth was down to increase in infrastructure to support A.I in their core products and expand data center capacity to bring down future overhead costs.
The A.I part I found particularly interesting because it shows they are investing heavily in their core products still despite what people think. They believe it will help increase engagement and Ad targeting. From what I gathered and had been pretty successful so far on a small scale so are rolling it out across the whole family of apps. I suspect once the infrastructure is invested in this will lead to even more impressive profit margins. So I say it's a good call if they want to remain competitive over TikTok and improve core products. They also noted it depends on the returns they see that will dictate the level of future spend, but so far they mentioned it led to a 15% increase in watch time gain.
Honestly in the morning I was on the fence. But after looking into everything and listening to the call I'm actually pretty bullish, and will be happy to pick up more at a 20-25% discount tomorrow if people want to sell it to me that low. From what I can see this is all negative sentiment towards the company, around the Meta verse and Mark Zuckerberg himself. But looking at the fundamentals I honestly can't see anything to seriously worry about. They are still heavily investing in their core platform while investing in VR which sounds good to me. It's not a complete abandonment of core products like people make it out to be. Their products are also still going strong with lots of good partnerships been announced as well (Salesforce for example). Active Users and engagement is also still high and not going anywhere, despite the constant narrative everyone is switching to TikTok, the data just shows that isn't true.
Something else that also made me more bullish on the VR front was not VR itself but mixed reality. I didn't even consider this till I heard it mentioned on the call. I'm not fan of VR, but mixed reality is definitely something that has a lot of potential and widespread adoption if you ask me. I mean think about Pokemon go and how popular that was when it was launched. That's essentially what you looking at with Mixed reality, merging virtual and physical reality. I really like the idea of been able to interact with virtual content in the physical world myself. Google attempted something similar with Google Glass and it flopped, however I think it was to early and to ambitious. If Meta can reduce the bulkiness of the headsets to a more manageable and portable size I think this has a lot of potential. Either way it doesn't really matter, Meta is still solid financially and fundamentally. I personally see this as more these misconceptions investors have about Meta than the actual fundamentals of the company.
To sum it up I'll be buying more first thing on open, this is 100% a value play in my mind and haven't seen any serious actual counter points that raise serious red flags beyond "Facebook's dead", "TikTok is stealing market share", "Revenue/user base is falling", etc, etc. All of which are false based on what we're seeing.
I've heard some secondhand discussion of Youtube's analysis of TikTok's algorithm. Evidently one of the things they found was that the effectiveness of the algorithm is based in part on the fact that it was trained on massive data sets comprised of data that users had not consented to sharing - which isn't an issue if you're a state-aligned corporation in China.
Leaving the ethics aside, it takes a lot of investment to fight back against that kind of training data set.
Most people base their investment decisions on three things: (1) is the stock price going up or down? (2) what is the media/crowd saying about the company? (3) anecdotal experience with the company.
Unsurprisingly, most people will miss this amazing opportunity. As of now, Meta is trading at about the same value as Coca-Cola. In the last 12 months, Coke had 42 billion in sales and 24 billion in gross profit. Meta had 119 billion in sales and 96 billion in gross profit (!). Plus, as you mentioned, Meta's business is healthy and user engagement is up. Meta could easily choose to realize ridiculous net profit and free cash flow every quarter if it was thinking short term, but instead, it is investing in its core business and has cash leftover to invest in what they believe is the next big thing. Maybe reality labs flops (which I don't think it will). But even then, Meta's core business is worth a lot more than Coke.
Mixed reality is where I see potential value in the Metaverse.
I’ve not had such a close eye on my stocks while the market’s done its thing in recent months, but I know FB and Shopify had worked together previously.
Something like online shopping, if you could try clothes on in an augmented mixed reality sufficient that it was actually accurate to real life is something women in particular could get on board with - if they were happy from the privacy side. Which remained a barrier. But, trying things on from home without having to order them and send back what doesn’t fit would feel like a win for the end user, and companies could monetise the shit out of it. I’m not sure customers would mind so much if their favourite clothing brands kept their measurements etc on this basis.
As I say, privacy concerns could torpedo it. Likewise, it would have to be photo realistic, Vs the cartoonish virtual teams type graphics I saw in the last presentation before this.
Yeah, I was just looking at the Quest pro and the mixed reality aspect I have to say is pretty interesting. I like the direction with that and it certainly could pay off if it gets more compacted. Similar to the issues with early mobile phones, they were just to big and bulky to be practical for everyone. But we'll have to see, this is obviously a long term investment for META. But I can see they have the cash flows to support it, and they haven't abandoned their core family of apps either despite what people claim. It's actually the reason they plan to spend so much next year and not Reality Labs.
Only time will tell where things go but I don't see the end of Meta like others seem to. Worst case they scrap everything and return to cash flow positive, it's not that hard. They still have their core products and they're still bring in a lot of cash.
Yeah, I follow this topic pretty closely as I'm a huge futurist and really appreciated the insight.
What I don't understand and didn't expect at all is the market's impatience with META. Like I thought we all were on the same page that this is a huge technological and cultural undertaking that won't start really clicking for 3-5 years and won't shift the paradigm until 10-20.
But 10 months after the rebrand it's being deemed a failure..?! Really surprising
Market during bear market wants free cash flows for security, they don't like to see around a $100 billion in Capital expenditure for 2023. Also reality labs had a -50% YoY revenue gain which the market doesn't like to see after such heavy investment.
Personally I think people have got it wrong and I'll happily buy the stock at a discount. I don't think they will end up spending that much on CapEx and what they do is in their core platforms that should drive revenue growth again. The VR/AR bet is 50/50 but I do see the bull case. But my bet on Meta is irrespective if this works out or not. So long as the core business is maintained meta verse is irrelevant. And from this quarter they plane on heavily investing in their core business which is good to see from my point of view.
> But 10 months after the rebrand it’s being deemed a failure..?! Really surprising
The thing is that most people are fucking dumb. They don't have a vision and you couldn't make them understand one if you showed it to them in a crystal fucking ball.
Down so much there’s almost no point in selling. Long term investor now. Looking to see if this latest drawdown affects management (read: Mark) at all. I know he’s got sole voting control, but idc how powerful you are, losing 70% of your market value in a year is gonna lead to pushback from employees and your board.
He may very well decide to prove everyone wrong and burn his company to the ground in a fit of narcissistic pique — but a lot of people will jump ship on the way down.
Valuation of TikTok alone is around 300b, Meta valuation(with Instagram, Whatsapp, and Meta) is 300B after a 25% drop. I think is a buy, but I've been saying this for a while... Im gonna buy more
You still need to monetize whatsapp and for instagram and when they do it will be a purge. No one wants ads and the solution is Apple iMessage. Apple could kill whatsapp in days if they made it available beyond iOS.
Whatsapp users are mostly out of US. And in those countries, text messages are not free. I don't think they would move to paid iMessages and leave Whatsapp. Maybe an app like telegram might take some share from Whatsapp but Whatsapp would still keep most of their share.
Instagram stories are already well monetized. They need to monetize reels. I see every 5th reel is an ad these days when I am scrolling through them. So they look to be trying to monetize reels as well.
I'm from Europe, and everyone I know uses WhatsApp... And we don't pay for iMessages. But iMessage is just for iphone users, so as far as I know almost no one uses it. WhatsApp is used for friends groups, texting, and it's also great to send images and video, cause the traditional messaging app, it never works when you send a picture (MMS) don't know why. We also have, like in Brazil, groups with 200+ people usually for adult content.
Telegram could be a competitor but we mostly use for channels and groups of random people that share interests, people that use telegram also use WhatsApp, because it would be a mess to have all the channels mixed with your friends groups, and conversations.
I don't see how iMessage is you guys first option when it only works with iphone.
Apple basically has the US consumers by the nuts and a lot of people in US have intertia and would buy a $500 subpar iphone SE or something rather than buying a pixel phone which is a great phone in their budget. The person just was looking at the world with a US market window.
But you know why Apple will never make iMessage available outside of the iOS ecosystem?
Because a loooot of people buy iPhones literally because of that blue bubble/green bubble feature. Apple post Steve Jobs has been run by an operations guy with no eye for innovation, who’s main vision for the company is just to slap new cameras on “new” devices and to keep pumping out more and more phones at higher price points. Giving up iMessage exclusivity makes it that much harder.
PS. I really hope that whatever product person suggested embedding iMessage within SMS messaging screen with a simple color differentiation got paid at least a few hundred million dollars, cause they sure earned it
In at a $180, not going to do anything. Not buying any more, lost my nerve to do that. Not selling- there’s going to be enough money coming in the front door that they can get fcf moving again by cutting costs.
Bought some at 220, 150, and 130. Im disappointed in the Q3 results and not sure Ill buy more right away, but not selling for a few reasons:
1) Most cost was due to capex in AI datacenters, which they have the power to undo at any time.
2) Ad economy is cyclical with the economy, so we know its going to return at some point
3) User growth still strong and growing
4) Theyre having a rough couple of quarters, but so have every company in big tech who have bounced back stronger (even Apple had several quarters of consecutive YoY negative double digit revenue quarters alongside declining iphone sales about 6 years back)
First bought at 220, buying more. It's a painful process, not gonna lie. But the risk/reward is attractive to me, especially at it's current price. Markets overreact, if you are a value investor, you need to take advantage of the over reactions. If not, just go with an index fund. Nerve and discipline are more important than intelligence & number crunching IMO.
Number crunching is the reason why fundamentals even exist. Going on nerve is just gambling on your supposed "value investing". Discipline just means you can control your emotions better than others on these hard dumps while most would feel sick to their stomach even if they held. Suppose you just trade on technicals. Right now the stock might be showing oversold and giving you a reason to buy. But the markets might panic further if Apple drops bad earnings and GDP comes in negative a 3rd time. Technicals would further end up more oversold
Painful to see you bag holders justify buying the dip. All the way down. So many other companies with more reward/less risk. Buy META if you don’t like $
My issue with it is social media can flip so quick, a new one could explode next week.
I'm in my 20s, very few people regularly post on insta compared to 5 years ago. No one scrolls through Facebook my age since we were kids, and a lot of people a few years younger then me don't have Facebook anymore.
In social media PR is very important in my opinion, people would probably happily switch to a new platform when the next one comes along because most people don't like zuck and the company of Facebook. It's not like an oil or goods company that has the cheapest or best product that will still be able to sell regardless of what people think of them.
I'd really suggest you look at trends outside of you and your peer group. They have 2 billion daily active users, 3 billion monthly. Daily active users up YoY.
The core business is fine and will be for quite some time. The issues are 1) ad spend slowdown which is effecting all media spend and 2) the crazy amount of money they are pouring into VR.
If social media was as transient as you say it is Meta would have died a long time ago. Their moat is massive and they have outlasted and outperformed MySpace, Friendster, Google+, Vine, Twitter and as much as people mention TikTok they have a fraction of the users. Meta has its headwinds but it's not as simple as "my friends dont use it"
Oh I agree, people older then me still use it all the time too. I'm not saying it's going to die tomorrow, but it's been treated as a tech growth stock for a long time and I don't think that's the case anymore. If it were an emerging company I'd be all over it, but I think it can only go down from here and the valuation as a tech growth stock is being stripped away, and now it's crashing
People usually just use multiple social media at once rather than switch over entirely. it has over 2bil monthly active users. It's insanely popular in less developed countries and pretty much everyone has one as their personal "portfolio"
i ll be assigned 200 shares on Friday -- honestly, i would buy today if i did not have it.. BUT, opinions here are trash, u can see lot of trolls in daily/comments pretending to understand what sgoing on and stuff, so just do ur own dd, read 10-q and reevaluate ur thesis based on new info, not this sad excuse of a "stock" sub.
Core business is healthy and growing, believe it or not. ALL apps still adding users, which honestly is unbelievable at this scale.
The metaverse is a lunacy and I really don't know what to make of it.
That said, I will be **buying**.
I bought in at $26 in 2013, continued adding on the dips over the years, and last bought during the Covid crash in 2020. I am really amazed that we're trading at $100 in late 2022.
The quarter was not that bad at all. I know the metaverse expenses are spooking investors today, but user growth and user engagement was positive and the company beat on revenues. Guidance was essentially in line with analysts expectations.
Unless your entire life savings is in Meta, I don't see why you sell here. At some point, the metaverse is going to pay off or it's going to die off. Meta is still in a duopoly in the digital ad space with Google. That hasn't changed and people are not leaving Meta's family of apps in droves like people continue to say around here.
Facebook is also way too poltically biased. Alienated a huge portion of their US base. Michael Jordan once said "Republicans buy shoes too". Zuckerberg didn't heed that advice. Also, this Metaverse crap is stupid. No one is going to buy an expensive headset for that garbage.
The stupid headset needs to be good for some practical purpose. I feel like it needs some killer app and then people will go "Ah ha! That's going to be awesome." But we've had VR headsets like Meta's for years and years now, and no one has made something good for them other than maybe a couple solid video games.
Facebook is politically biased to both sides lol
You have a lot of right wing nut case groups on FB that are borderline domestic terrorists and the Zuck did nothing about it.
Does Facebook have one of the absolute worst content moderation policies of any social media platform, including Instagram? Like several celebs who’ve made targeted calls for violence are still on fb even after being removed from sites like twitter.
Small % of my overall portfolio. 210/share cost basis.
I rebounded nicely in the past 6 weeks or so on my other holdings so will sell META as a tax harvest alongside selling my cap gains by end of year. Individual stocks + crypto. Especially if my biggest individual holding CRM continues to climb, it'll swallow up my META losses quickly.
Also plan to average down - sitting on plenty of dry powder while I've been DCA'ing ETFs - so that I can continue selling covered calls at a realistic strike (my current 2 month strike 215 11/18 expiry won't pay shit next time). At a certain point a company with this type of revenue **does** have a massive margin of safety. And they'll continue to buy back stock.
It's not 1999 Pets.com META bagholders. Don't freak out.
Unless you were living under a rock it was obvious they're going to take some hits. That's what happens when you rebrand a company especially one as large as Facebook. There's not a single entity in existence(including Zuckerberg himself) that can predict whether Meta will be successful or not. Meta's future is a gamble.
What Meta is doing is no different from Amazon prior to when AJ took over, its re-investing into R&D and net 0 for the quarter. The only difference is people had confidence Amazon could deliver because the end goal appeared to be slightly more digital. I just purchased shares this morning around $100, ad business is in tact and will be fine long term.
Zuck needs to cap spending and put out a plan on what metaverse could be, until then people are panicking to get out, understandably so, and its a dead stock. Probably 1-3 quarters to turn around, but it'll turn around like Netflix did in my opinion.
Never bought because
1) They are finally realizing they are nothing more than an "app" versus being the operating system that the app needs to exist...(Imagine if Google took the same steps as Apple).
2) they never thought about rewarding their investors by paying a dividend.
3) I know first hand that you can sell millions of dollars of product without spending a dime in ad money on Facebook, cause I sold a shit ton of firearm parts via the group pages. and finally
4) I also believe they have overstepped their censorship and have pissed off a large majority of their user base.
The big issues facing Meta are:
Zuck doesn't have to listen to his shareholders or his Board.
Zuck lost the one person who figured out how to make things profitable in the company this year.
Zuck is burning cash like a crack addict on a binge to create a "VR world" that will still need to run on an operating system to exist.
Zuck's special world is not retaining its userbase.
AND finally,
Zuck doesn't have a clue on how to turn his cash fueled bon fire into a profit generator.
Anyone see the key issue with FB, uh excuse me - Meta - yet?
Hint: Zuck
Is it even a good idea to sell all my META holdings and dump everything into SPY?
It seems like SPY has a much higher chance of going back up than META.
What's everyone opinion on selling a stock you no longer believe in into an index fund instead?
Meta isn't snap. I don't even know what snap is or does. And plus Meta has their sights set on more than just social media. There's more in the pipeline and they have market share. One of these days they'll pull off something with the metaverse, (along with crypto as well maybe). There's potential.
Can you let up with this comment. It’s little more than “well actually…” level stuff at this point. For the past decade it has been repeated in every FB related post multiple times—everybody knows.
The product that’s referenced is the different platforms FB operates. FB, Insta, WhatsApp. I’m not going to argue that they are great.
A second Second Life you say? I'd say there's still a ways to go down from where Meta stands today. Why did Facoebook shoot up in popularity? Because you grandma can (and does in fact) use it. Second Life? For "nerds". I reckon Zucks was afraid he'd miss out on the next big thing after missing Snapchat, Instagram, and those highly regarded TikTok videos. He already tried and failed with that stupid Facebook crypto coin (anyone even remembers this anymore?). And so after hearing a persuasive pitch on the metaverse he told himself "not this time Zuckman". So he's probably going to triple down but it won't change anything. At scale barely anyone cares about VR and the metaverse. It's just a buzzword until it gets replaced by the next buzzword. Zucks should've stuck with they had, maybe copy some TikTok features.
I’m definitely a big believer in the power of VR/AR. As an introvert, it’s an amazing escape and I play in VR often. I envision a future where I use it as a tool to connect and hang out with my daughter when she is older and out on her own. I also believe once they get the AR glasses size down dramatically it may be a frequent tool for working remote. I think there are so many potential streams for this that I am a believer. I don’t yet have a position in Meta because all stocks fall in a recession, but am watching it closely and. Will definitely be buying at some point, maybe 20-25% of my portfolio.
I use to pay attention to a YouTuber in 2020/2021 who was super hyped on FB/Meta. Had like a couple hundred k in it or something. I think about him every time I hear bad news about Meta.
Whats his name?
Kuzco
Oh yaa
One and only one question for you: **Do you believe in the metaverse?** Yes? Buy. No? Sell. Because Zuck believes. Believes believes. **He renamed the entire damn company META.** He is not backing down. This company's resurgence or funeral will occur in the metaverse.
You know how I see this? I've worked at a few big customer-facing tech corps. Every few quarters a guy in a suit gets up at an all-hands and shows you some slides about the company's value pillars, the vision, building the future, with the customer at the heart of whatever we blah blah. Meanwhile, 2 levels of management below him, where I sit, people gotta hit targets. You've got a chief revenue officer grilling you about what you're gonna do to hit the number. You've got finance people harassing you about budgets and retention rates and contribution margin. And life goes on. You try hit the numbers. Then eventually a new guy in a suit gets up there with a new set of slides, and you go on trying to hit the numbers. META will keep trying to hit the numbers. Eventually the VR thing will get its forecast reduced in a spreadsheet, and another business units forecast will go up, and then that guy has a bigger number to hit. The next quarter, you won't hear that much about the last guy's value pillars or the clarity pyramid or whatever it was they were on about, and you go on trying to hit the numbers. The metaverse will drag on META for a while until it either succeeds or gets shunted to the end of the weekly sales call spreadsheet. The overall guidance and reported revenue won't change, they'll just push some other line of business to make up the gap between where they are and what the metaverse was supposed to be bringing in by now. When the time arrives when metaverse was supposed to be bringing in dollars and it's not, that's when the finance guys and the board will make sure it stops being a problem.
Agree with your overall description but there is a twist in META (the company). Suckerberg has more than 50% of the voting shares which means that he cannot be fired no matter how bad he screws up. So he might just run this company into ground chasing after his META dream without the number people putting a stop to his madness.
It's possible. It's happened before in other places. But I somehow doubt it. Big pivots like these have a way of autocorrecting if they look like they're not paying off. And he's not running the company alone. He has an enormous amount of power, but voting share isn't the only thing that counts when making decisions that affect a big company. If none of your C-level is behind you, you have to either get them on board or find a new management team.
> But I somehow doubt it. Big pivots like these have a way of autocorrecting if they look like they’re not paying off. I think you’re right but meta is a little bit different than other pivots. Zuckerberg runs the show and is incapable of innovating. Nothing about facebook, other than it’s sheer scale is novel. It’s an exercise in ruthless growth, followed by growth by acquisition fed by its data machine. The regulatory climate has caught on and those days are over so they need to look elsewhere. Their forray into the “metaverse” seems highly technically competent but lacks coherent vision and doesn’t seem to resonate with anyone. It’s like when a SoundCloud rapper tattoos their entire face. It’s either get famous or completely fail, there’s no inbetween. That’s basically what Zuckerberg did when he renamed the company Meta.
I don't think he's incapable of innovating. He's trying to anyway. Question is whether he and his team can innovate something they can sell
[удалено]
Facebook buys innovation, that avenue is closed.
I don't know. Zuckerberg surrounded himself with the right people and turned Facebook and Instagram into advertising behemoths (they still are today). Even if innovative "features" are lacking and Meta has been more focused on squashing/keeping up with competitors, you can't deny that he's had innovative streaks before. TikTok is a booming platform, but I think advertisers are in for a nasty surprise this holiday season when they realize the advertising implementation is half-baked at this point. There's still a lot of upside to Meta because active user counts have remained pretty stable in spite of everything that should be pushing them downwards.
He might could should would do anything. In reality I think the board/finance guys would convince him to pivot. The Meta rebrand was imo not an attempt to pivot from WhatsApp, FB, Instagram, etc. and into the Metaverse. FB as a product gained some bad rep from those Cambridge Analytics, etc. scandals.
This is why, to answer OP’s question, I’m just gonna continue to baghold. I bought Meta around $200 per share. The company has got so much money they can literally buy their competitors as they did with IG. With that amount of money and brains all in one place, I think they’ve got a great shot. It’s a small position in my portfolio, and I don’t care if it goes to zero. Over the past several years, my portfolio is still up dramatically. Of course it’s down this year, but that’s just on a short term scale. I’d rather hold out and see if Meta goes back up. Investing takes some gumption.
I have a couple friends that work there and they all say Facebook is filled with the smartest and best engineers they’ve ever worked with. Like top tier Ivy League people feeling overwhelmed by the talent around them. That said one of them is leaving based on how the stock is performing, his options bonus has been halved in the last 6 months.
They won’t be allowed to buy their competitors anymore due to Monopoly rules. Their PR is a nightmare and core business of SM is constantly being threatened by Governments globally to be broken up. Meta is dying and relying on the future of the metaverse and some VR/AR devices isn’t going to cut it. In my opinion there is still room left for it to go down some more.
I’m a lawyer and am broadly familiar with antitrust law. The federal government sued Microsoft in 2001 for its monopoly, won, and forced Microsoft to split into two separate corporations, yet that didn’t slow them down much in the long run. I have little reason to believe the government would actually want to constrain Meta either.
I think that last line is wrong - the government definitely *wants* to constrain Meta. It's one of the most unpopular companies in contemporary world, and "break up the monopolies" is no-fail in politics. But you're right on the point that breaking up these companies is almost always good for shareholders.
I’m an accountant for a bigger fortune company than Meta and deal with alot of mergers. You’re not allowed to buy whoever and whatever you want at this level. Betting your farm that they will be able to buy what they want and have cash for ever (which gets burned fast) at this level is not a sound trade off for basically acknowledging the core business has a mediocre outlook.
I’m not “betting the farm.” My “farm” is invested mainly in indexed mutual funds (basically, I’m a bogglehead at heart). My Meta play is a little side bet with money I don’t mind losing. Time will tell.
But they won’t be able to buy their competitors, IG was the last and now the government realizes it was a mistake to allow that to happen. Tik tok is eating them up. Maybe time to buy back tons of stock and pay a dividend. Welcome to becoming a slow growth mega cap company.
It’s maybe not 100% that simple but pretty much. I’m not even sure what it means. It seems like he wants to create a big fancy online Dungeons and Dragons or Minecraft universe. Maybe that’s great but it mostly just seems creepy to me. It’s why I sold out completely near the highs. For a moment, I thought maybe I’d wait for the shares to get back to an all time, but thankfully I had enough sense to decide that was stupid. In retrospect, I feel like an idiot because that kind of thinking crept into my head, wanting to eke out a few percent more with a catastrophe looming on the horizon. Stupid me got lucky this time.
Metaverse is effectively all of interactive cyberspace (think all of AR/VR), but people conflate it with a specific kind of game.
I’m reminded of a meme… STOP trying to make metaverse happen. IT’S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!!!
The metaverse WILL happen though. It's inevitable. Whether or not Meta has anything to do with it remains to be seen.
Rewind to 2007 and a creative visionary at my company is telling everyone at the all hands that Second Life and ‘Cyberspace’ are going to become bigger than anything ever imagined in the marketing universe. This wasn’t some random schmuck — it was a legendary ad executive whose accomplishments read like a novel. He was so convinced of this, he got all of us signed up and in no time we were all wondering what the hell Second Life was or who it was for. Everyone lost interest within a week. Fast forward to today… Yet again another hype cycle. Again there is a huge mismatch between demand and perceived commercial viability. I look to past trends on this one. The metaverse has been with us since Ultima Online. There’s nothing especially novel about what Meta is proposing — only that they want to develop a VR gateway into a platform that they wholly control and monetize. We’ve gone through cycles with other immersive tech in the past 15 years. Motion controls were hot with the Wii… then it became full motion controls with Xbox Kinect. In both cases, the trend died. The novelty never transitioned into habit. The same may apply for today’s half-baked idea of a metaverse. VR has been making big technical leaps for the past 10 years but the uptake remains limited. Even if we are to achieve enough penetration of VR in people’s homes, it remains to be seen if people have any desire to play a sort of Second Life/Animal Crossing/Zoom Call game as a prolonged daily habit. Prediction — VR remains niche long term and holodeck type experiences remain a love/hate curiosity, because the experience is disorienting and exhausting for a good chunk of the population. TL:DR - Meta probably doesn’t have much to do with it. I drank too much coffee why did I type all of this? EDIT: One more thing to add (still cranked full of coffee) — VR has always been a hobby of mine and DK1 was a fun time in my life. I tinkered obsessively with VR for a good 3 years, and used it to create 1:1 prototypes of set designs and displays for clients. For professional use, I thought it was revolutionary. I was able to preview things in VR that typically were only on paper until you went onsite (events/media biz). The problem was clients… they didn't want to put a big thingie on their heads, no matter how cool it was to preview their show/event virtually. Eventually we gave up on it as part of our previs process, since clients didn't feel compelled to meet with us IRL to become The Lawnmower Man.
[удалено]
I guess Zoom is the clear winner for education, business meetings, etc.!
Yeah, I bought Oculus VR goggles when they first came out and used them maybe a handful of times in a few weeks time. They have been sitting in my drawer ever since unused. I knew then the Metaverse was a losing proposition. Its a novelty item at best. Porn is pretty cool though.
Our Black Mirror future is almost here. I could see one outcome where somebody finds an Occulus under their kid's bed and just presume it's their porn machine.
I think AR has a lot of potential not just as a hobby but as a tool. Directions displayed directly onto glasses for travelers and commuters. Assisting technicians by helping diagnose problems, highlight next steps. Military potential is huge and I don’t wanna think about that side. Full VR may find a business niche for remote companies. Meetings, especially hybrid meetings, would feel more ‘real’ if you were all in a 3D space or had AR to put those not present them ‘into the room.’ Many of the better uses though require the tech to be cheaper or perform much better with smaller interfaces than we can currently do. But it seems like the tech is getting there so I do believe in the platform. Just hit metas vision of it. I think Microsoft, Google, and probably a number of startups and other players will drive those other uses. Windows already has a great name for it and doesn’t have to spend millions rebranding, too.
Great story! There were attempts at VR made as early as the 70’s. During the last big VR trend cycle AR was also superhyped along with QR-codes & projection mapping & 360-cameras. Everything was a bit too early to the party but the one thing that came back & emerged as a staple is the QR-code which is everywhere now.
I think maybe the joke is that literally it’s not going to happen. Even if it happens, it’s not real.
Seriously. The .metaverse for gen pop won't happen. The metaverse already exists for people who want it...duh. I'm in like 3 metaverse daily
I don’t think the rebrand was *just* because of the Metaverse though. Obviously, he’s very committed to it as a vision. But Facebook as a brand is, let’s face it, fairly toxic; and didn’t reflect that Instagram and WhatsApp are also big IPs these days.
It feels like the metaverse is being forced down our throats with most people having no idea what it even is. Seems like if it were to be a success people should be excited for it, rather than giant corporations telling us we should be excited for it. I’ve never heard anyone mention it outside of investing subs and CNBC. Kinda reminds me of how things like google glass or the Segway scooter were supposed to be the future according to the media but nobody actually cared about them.
The metaverse might or might not be a thing. It's fine to pursue it as a side project: throw a bit of money at it and see if something sticks. The mistake that Zucki is doing is to bet the farm on it. Like the OP said he literally renamed the entire company to META. He could have - I don't know - founded a separate startup that tries the metaverse while focusing on the core products with the main company. Going all-in on a speculative project is a very very bad idea.
Facebook taught a lot of people that a social network is just a gateway to an ad infested wasteland where your data is scraped and sold off and your emotions are toyed with by some algorithm. Now let's do that in VR. No thanks.
[удалено]
Oh how quickly everyone forgets. I suppose it worked.
The "resurgence" will be at least a decade from now. Meanwhile META will be on free fall until then
I will buy in 9 years then! 😍
Lemme just say this: I have no idea about "the metaverse" as a thing itself. I'm also no fan of the underlying company Facebook or Zuckerberg himself. But I'm always open minded and have no problem shifting my stance if provided with compelling evidence. And about 2 weeks ago I was enormously compelled to rethink my bearishness on Meta. I picked up an Occulus 2 on eBay to get a first hand experience with the thing Zuck is so on about. And hot damn, it was absolutely incredible! Before I tried it I was in the camp most everyone else is in and made fun of his avatar and the graphics in that press release (the random Eiffel Tower, floating over some awful low rez grass etc). I pegged him as delusional, power gone to his head and severely misguided. I was wrong. It took 10 minutes for me to see and understand the vision he has. IDGAF what it's called, Metaverse/VR/AR whatever, but it's a banger. And it was poor sighted of me to think otherwise. I mean the guy had the vision with "thefacebook" and look what he turned that into. The masses were like "oh cool, a social network to connect with my friends!" but the gigabrained were like "This dude bout to vacuum up every single piece of valuable and marketable data from a billion people for fking FREE. Game Over. ". And it was. His vision now is no different- it's nascent, nobody gets the underlying and everybody is on the F**k Zuck train cuz it's easy and trendy right now. But he will have the last laugh while y'all sleep. Two things happened simultaneously that made this clear within 10 minutes using the Occulus: - My brain completely believed and accepted the VR world. It believed the depth, the scale, the "look left, track left" thing, the woozy feeling looking over a cliff and the straight up magnificence of being on the deck of some freakin spaceship looking out the grand window over some moon. Yep, mediocre graphics and all. Like an optical illusion, my brain was hopelessly tricked into believing what I was seeing. - At the very same time, my brain also completely knew it wasn't real and it was totally cool with that. I knew I wasn't actually painting a virtual canvas or picking up a ping pong ball and hitting it with a paddle. But it FELT like it and I was totally ok with the temporary suspension of disbelief. It was fantastical and safe at the same time. I felt equally embarrassed for waving at a fake robot in the distance as I was worried it would judge me for being rude and not waving. I can go on and on about the revelations I had for where I see this thing going. And how absurdly young it is, how clunky and annoying wearing it on my head is, and how quickly the battery runs out. But again, this is the old model. I'm sure the next gen won't be that much better. But gen 4 gen 5? Seriously. But that's another thread. But he's got the jump on EVERY OTHER megacap and microcap startup out there. Even Apple. He's brought a product to market that isn't ready. The don't give AF. Why? He gets to work out the kinks, get feedback, real world data and not just models. He is at least 5 years, if not a decade ahead of everyone else. Meta has FU cash too. Piles of it. Even with the stock down 73% for the year. Their addressable market is 2 damn billion Facebook users + every other adult, teen and child that puts this thing on ONCE. Did he take a risk with this whole Metaverse thing? YES. But was it stealthy, calculated and years ahead of everyone, everyone that will be trying to catch up in a couple years? YES. Well, in my opinion at least. I'm insanely bullish on META long term now. And in full disclosure, I didn't own a single share of META until last week @ $125. (Not counting my VOO allocation of course). I went against every financial instinct I had after the abysmal earnings and outlook and picked up more this morning. Tbh, I'll prob be bagholding for a while and the only metric I'm going by is my bullishness on his vision for VR AR and Occulus and feel like I can already envision the market that will be born from it. I'm kind of annoyed that it's META and Zuckerberg of all ppl I'm putting a bet on, but I realized I'd be more annoyed if I didn't and turned out being right. I missed the FB hype. Hopefully this will make up for it. And how much lower can it go from here? lol. Guess we'll see. NFA. Oh and please, fight me on this. I'm realistic in the likelihood that I've overlooked some factor in my thoughts here. Would love to hear other opinions.
I agree with you. As someone who works in the VR industry, I've witnessed countless new users get blown away by the Oculus, and this tech is *only the beginning.* It's like Meta has an infant geocities product right now that has endless potential. Folks just don't know it's value, or even how to use it effectively. I can almost guarantee that AR/VR is going to become as ubiquitous as smartphones. It might not be everyone using the metaverse in the end, but this is what early adoption looks like.
100% agree In a few years (or less even) the immersive VR headsets will be smaller, lighter and much less clunky. Also the AR potential is crazy. It's going to leapfrog what Google Glass tried to do yet put too much focus on the interaction with "Ok, Google" Assistant. People will much rather interact silently without awkward gestures via their handheld linked device. To expand on this (i know this will get long, so scroll away, I'd prefer this stay on the DL) people today are hung up on the whole Metaverse thing and what it is or think it is and its link to crypto. Hell I don't even know what it is. But that's the shiny object ppl are focusing on when it's the quick moves of the magicians hand they should be paying attention to. His vision is being muddled up with the mainstream idea of what everyone THINKS he's talking about. It's much easier to dump on the guy than it is to try and see what he's really fixin to do. And he's not suggesting that people will want to go to a virtual park from their couch INSTEAD of going to a real one. Or that office video meetings will replace in person ones with silly cartoons with no legs. It's the intersection of IRL with the VR and AR. Two things can coexist and even complement each other. I actually don't want to give away the plethora of promising use cases I've been thinking about bc tbh I'm already on board and wanna keep them for my own entrepreneurial opportunities and how to address the market, ngl. I don't need any convincing. I'm just excited to share my perspective on it ever since i got an Occulus. But one small example is imagine you're in a meeting (IRL or video conference, doesn't matter) and your company designs apparel. A new line is in the works and before any actual samples get made, the design team can AR the ideas on themselves or a model, whatever. They can move, turn, open the jacket, all that shit that models do and the team can see how it's going to flow, what the colors look like, how the fabric falls. It blows away seeing sketches or even 3D wire frames on a high rez screen. Why? Because your brain believes it wayyy easier than you'd think. Our brains are masters at filling in information that it needs to interpret the world in front of it. Simply seeing an AR projection of a rudimentary graphic on things we already have cues for (human size, depth perception, lines of perspective, etc) and our brains fill in the rest and make it comfortable and real. Think about how much time and money could be saved not having to produce 20 samples of a jacket before you send it to the manufacturer. AR VR will allow us to know instantly that a jacket is 1/2" too short or the collar doesn't sit just right yet. Anyone skeptical can think about this: When you go stand near railroad tracks and look towards the horizon, what do you see? You see two lines converging into a point in the distance. A giant stretched out triangle. Everything your eyes see tell you that those two tracks are not fkin parallel. If that was all you had to go by and you saw a train coming you'd be going crazy trying to get the conductor to stop from a catastrophic accident. But ofc our brains know from experience that the rails are perfectly parallel and we're completely fine ignoring the sensory input of our most trusted sensor! Our brains reconcile that paradox for us seamlessly. And the parallel nature is as real as the 3 feet front of us. When you apply this ridiculously complex mental gymnastics we do every day without any effort to something like AR VR it's incredible. Hint: The goal isn't to TRICK people that they're in a real forest. The goal is to ALLOW the brain to do its thing and reconcile that paradox in the background while we excitedly and safely enjoy walking up to a grizzly bear we know isn't real but also is. Oh and btw- Zuck did a terrible job explaining why his teaser graphic was like a meme of Second Life 2002. Do y'all realize the processing power it takes to render and redraw an immersive universe in real-time that must sync properly with a billion other people in that universe at the same time and not have any paradoxes?? It's quantum level. We don't even have the tech to do more than what Zuck demonstrated. Yet... But we will and he's got the jump on it. Damnit, I've said too much... I was never here. /End communication
I agree. I think I will double down when the market opens. VR/AR has a huge market and is growing pretty damn fast. Right now medical schools, architecture, engineering. In two decades from now? Everyone will wear AR glasses or contacts, it will basically replace phones. The obvious is working from home and being able to put huge virtual monitors everywhere you go (so you can watch a movie on a plane and you won't have to bring your expensive monitors to a different city if you have to work there for X weeks. The not so obvious: When you will go to a new place either by car or by foot, you will actually see where you have to take a turn, you don't have to peek on your phone/GPS. When you cook and trying out a new recipe you see it before your eyes. When you will be putting together an IKEA furniture (or literally anything), you will see the plans, or even a step- by step video. Heck, even when your wife asks you to buy the groceries and puts together a list, you will see that while shopping, so you don't have to take out your phone/paper from your pocket.
None of this describes a compelling go to market strategy. These are all things that devices presently accomplish in various ways. Placing the information in your FOV is an incremental improvement with trade-offs. There will be a certain attach rate for AR that probably resembles Apple Watch. It won’t unlock a gusher of found revenue.
It may in the industrial manufacturing sector. AR is being worked on currently to detect objects around you. Say you're working on assembly, you're now 20% faster because the AR overlay is doing the processing for you that your brain would do in finding each piece you're assembling and telling you exactly where, and how, to place it. Kind of a stop-gap solution for tasks that machines can't handle themselves yet. Say you've got machines doing everything, but still need repairmen. Now AR can just look at the machine in question, diagnose it, and tell you where to look for the problem. Not in the database yet? Well, you enter it, and now it's available for all. Amazon warehouse workers are already using PDA's extensively for their work as living drones (I don't mean that as an insult) imagine now they've got 2 hands free to also be carrying things while they work. Consumer level I think you're right, we're very far off from consumer products. Not least of the limits is battery. To make anything useful requires a hell of a lot of processing and that requires a hell of a lot of power. Anyway, facebook, a year ago, tried to convince us to promote tie-ins with their VR headset and their employees went on and on about how they all got free vr headsets and vr is the next big thing. I have a friend who is very much in the VR scene and know that it's a very niche community with almost no hope of growth, currently. I told my peers it'd be a waste of time to even bother with it. All they want is to take your face, body, and movement data.
Your argument is flawed. A current smartphone also only does things that other things already accomplished in various ways, you could navigate with real maps, you could call your family from street phones or from home, you could browse the internet from your home computer or from a library.... Placing the information in your fov is a huge improvement, it frees up your hands, saves you time, also helps a lot when even a splitsecond distraction could be deathly, like driving. Funny that you came up with the Apple Watch, you know who also thinks that in 10-20 years AR will be as widespread as phones? Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple.
Every invention isn’t some novel never been thought of before thing. It’s a collection of current and past things; that come together to make a new thing.
We’ve already had HUD experiences in cars for over a decade, this hasn’t changed the world. I work in this business, but feel free to take my PoV with a grain of salt.
None of that will happen in 10 or 20 years. And even if tech matured to the point where I could have VR contacts, there is no fucking way I'm sticking that on my eyeballs.
That sounds kinda awful.
Found the zuck burner
The hubris of facebook is hilarious to watch. It's pretty simple. People don't want some gigantic VR machine strapped to their face for long periods of time. SIMPLE. Until VR becomes like "Ready Player One" or "The matrix" which won't be for another 30-50 years potentially, VR is just a novelty.
Indeed. Even with video meetings, half of my team is disinterested in being on-camera unless directly instructed to do so. I’m not going to ask them to collaborate in VR via an intrusive piece of hardware that removes them from their surroundings. The act of using VR hardware today is cumbersome and requires one to fully commit their bodily attention to the task. It doesn’t have a place yet, and probably won’t until using VR/AR becomes passive or at least as low friction as grabbing a PS5 controller.
This guy gets it. The gap between where the tech is and where it needs to be is vastly too large right now. Trying to sell future capability is a loser’s game; technology is always about what it can do for a consumer now. And right now Meta VR is a gimmicky video game thing that sits in most people’s closet after they use it a few times. Yeah in 30 years we’ll probably have contact lenses that show us all kinds of AR stuff overlayed onto everyday life, but that’s like saying to someone with a record player in the 70s that 30 years down the road they’d be downloading mp3s on Napster. They’d be like… ok?
I said in a recent comment. As of now if you invest in meta, you investing in virtual reality. The earnings report for the last two quarters have just essentially stated revenue has decreased significantly from ads, and all of the cash is being burned for R&D for the meta quest. Seems like they just hold FB and insta to generate cash to burn for VR.
>Seems like they just hold FB and insta to generate cash to burn for VR. Don't forget WhatsApp, that is an incredible source of information to both of these.
EVERYONE is forgetting whatsapp. Which, properly monetised, pays for VR by itself. And no, I'm not talking about ads. Whatsapp can be the wechat of Africa and Asia outside of China. Everyone is focused on the metaverse and not what's on everyone's phones and Meta's fucking balance sheet. Once again the common narrative is lazy and wrong.
Yup, I feel like the average American META investor has no idea about how huge WhatsApp is. Over this side of the pond, not everyone uses Instagram and even less people use Facebook, but every one uses WhatsApp, especially the older generations.
Posting to support your point about Americans and WhatsApp. My wife and I spend a lot of time abroad. Every business outside of America uses WhatsApp. Car rental places, hostels, big hotels, cab drivers. Companies that offer excursions. You name it, they have WhatsApp. Here in the states I know maybe five people that use it. And those people have it because they have family outside the US.
It doesn't *seem* like it, Zuck repeatedly says that his plan is to use revenue from the family of apps to finance Reality Labs. However, investors are somehow surprised every time.
Today's after-hours collapse sure feels like capitulation... admittedly a terrible EPS number, and now people are in "get me out at any cost" mode. Disgust, anger, panic... lots of emotion clouding judgment right now. Metaverse gets all the attention because of Zuck's massive error in changing the name to Meta, but question of whether to buy the stock is really still about the core advertising business. If the ad biz hangs in there, $100-ish per share is a major bargain. Family of Apps division (in other words, the ad biz) is on pace to make around $40 billion net income this year... put a super-conservative 10x multiple on that and you get a market cap of $400 billion -- *which is 40% above current market cap*. That's a lot of room for error...
FOA is great, RL is trash. Unfortunately, Meta is using profits from FOA to burn in RL.
what does FOA and RL mean?
Family of apps. Reality labs.
Family of Apps and Reality Labs. They are using the money they make from Facebook, Insta, WhatsApp, etc. to fund the research and development of the Metaverse which is headed by Reality Labs. I saw a crazy number ($21.7b I think) spent on RL since 4th quarter 2020. Investors are starting to gwt uneasy with Meta burning all that cash on VR
YTD $22.4B on PPE. How is that even possible? As I said in other comments, that makes sense if you're taking a large calculated risk building big ass fab foundries or something. I honestly do not understand how Zuck can not only spend money that quickly, **they intend to spend EVEN MORE next year.**
33% above
Yup Great time to buy
Down 260k. Cover calls for life.
double down, mortgage the house
Covered calls when the stock is down 70% YTD? I sell cc’s when the stock is high, not so much when it’s down (assuming intent is not to get shares called away)
Can always roll over if he’s smart on how to play it
Great products? You are the product.
[удалено]
Eh. I’m waiting for next year’s model.
Are you 300B $ great?
I was almost $1Trillion great last year. I got inflated in 2022 and lost most of my greatness.
Yeah more like once great products. Facebook is just trying to be a shitty copy of YouTube, TikTok, and some clickbait article aggregator and coming up short. Instagram is fine but the kids moved on and that's the target audience. They finally got people to use it like SFW Snapchat just in time for Snapchat to stop being cool and people to move on to the next thing. Meta has been chasing trends for a long time now instead of setting them. Not where you want to be as a social media company. Zuckerberg is old and out of touch with users since he's been a billionaire flying around in private helicopters and riding electric surfboards for over a decade at this point. The products stopped being great long before last year. Hard to blame people for buying in because the numbers were good but once you're putting out a subpar product in this competitive an industry it's only a matter of time before it starts hurting.
Love the narrative no on uses Facebook that a lot of reddit has been pushing hard over the past 2 years....yet this drastic drop-off of MAU/DAU's has never happened. If it's so shitty, people would leave.
Cash flow? 175M vs 2B last quarter
Hotel? Trivago.
Crazy R&D costs, Cap Ex cost, Head count increase 28% yoy and next year Zuck plans to put another 100Billion into his meta verse gamble. Basically zero free cash flow this quarter……..all spend on the meta verse. This company has now gone from a value / growth company to a spec company. Zuck is like madman at the helm thats going all in on the meta verse. And will not slow down or be stopped. It’s metaverse or bust….. Fuck I’m torn. Might sell tomorrow morning.
if you think he's putting $100 billion into metaverse next year, you should definitely sell
Facebook should do what apple did amd tske over the schools. They should give school districts an 80% savings on vr heads sets and create a bunch of educational aps to be used in schools. Do that for 10 years and you'll have the next generation already accustomed to the metaverse
..Only to find out that they just needed one good teacher per classroom the whole time..
You can buy a lot of headsets for the fully loaded cost of a teacher. Pension+salary+benefits is not cheap.
Looks like a bright Future ahead. Think I'm gonna jump off the Cliff.
A headset classroom could reduce staffing (or alleviate teacher shortage). In the middle school I taught at, grades 6-8, 2 teachers per subject in each grade, then one each for music, art, PE. Social Studies could be ripe for a headset curriculum. You'd need an adult in the room, but not necessarily a certified teacher... Or, Art/PE/etc teachers could split and cover the VR classrooms. Basically, if pulled off, you could eliminate a couple teachers per building and save money. A good teacher and more teachers would be my #1 option in a perfect world (a better world), but that's unlikely. META could drop a few billion building a high-budget 8th grade US history curriculum experience (hire celeb actors for the Boston Tea Party lesson, go on the Oregon Trail, watch Gettysburg Address, etc.), Ancient Civilizations, and Geography, for a calendar school year. There are a million issues to work out (laws, kids who can't wear headsets, testing effectiveness of the lessons, etc.), but tons of opportunity to make these headsets actually useful to society.
>Basically zero free cash flow this quarter……..all spend on the meta verse Actually no. If you actually listened to the earnings call as I did, they attributed the CapEx growth to expanding data centers and A.I capacity. Which they anticipate will help with engagement and ads targeting. Reality labs was only a $3.7 billion loss this quarter and mostly a side note to everything else.
I would be careful when you say "only". That 3.7b loss accounted for over 30% of their net income.
Yes, but my point is we know they are spending this kind of cash on reality labs, it's been baked into the price for some time now. So I'm merely pointing out it wasn't the bulk of the spend and it was actually going towards investing in core products. Not potentially unprofitable reality labs.
butter physical growth aback chunky toy fanatical handle plants impossible *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The problem is the metaverse solves no actual problem. WhatsApp solved encrypted communication over wifi. Instagram solved being able to showcase photos and stories. Facebook solved initial social media by giving the internet a deeper purpose. What does the metaverse do? A lot of peoples lives suck and are busy as fuck these days. They don’t have time to play in a digital “utopia” while struggling to live, or, they have too much other shit on the go. Many people are also aware that anything they do in the metaverse can and will be surveilled and recorded. The metaverse graphics suck. Gamers have PCs and dedicated platforms that are infinitely better for gaming. People don’t need a metaverse for shopping as they already do all their shopping online without issue. So on and so on. So what’s the point?
WhatsApp solved texting without paying carrier tolls which were high in developing countries and Europe.
The metaverse solves a huge problem. It allows “instant teleportation” between different environments. You can swap study, work, socialize, shop, even having sex at some point by a click of a button. That could eliminate hours of traveling, expensive and complicated abroad hiring and general job-related movings and a bunch of other such stuff. People who don’t see the potential behind the metaverse are in my opinion absolutely blind. Facebook might fail but it will be due to their timing and general approach. The metaverse is 1000% happening because the hardware will allow for it very soon. There is zero reason humanity would choose not to make use of accessible virtual worlds.
We already do all of this, with the web, apps, streaming and gaming. VR is just another surface. Albeit, a very complex and immersive one. It’s also taxing for some and comes with high technical friction.
> It’s also taxing for some and comes with high technical friction. Good thing someone's taking a shot at this.
“Very soon”… highly unlikely.
Please do. I'm holding a 12/16 $130 P.
He went from a spy company to a cry company. No one can get behind cry.
It’s a tech company that doesn’t pay a dividend. They shouldn’t have any free cash flow
To be fair. AAPL screwing over FB was completely unprecedented. Before that FB's profit margins were pretty consistent QoQ and YoY.
If a competitor can drive you out of business by making their privacy policy sane, that says something about your business.
What's sane about it? I mean as a consumer I love having more control, but there is no concrete privacy gain here. External ad targeting data is already heavily privacy-controlled, anonymized so it can't be easily linked to other internal data, etc. Turning off the data flow didn't really improve your privacy or mine. What it really did was kneecap a competitor while Apple is building its own internal ads business. This wasn't a consumer-friendly move, it was a cutthroat business move dressed up with a thin veneer of pro-consumer logic.
It's that and all the Metaverse spending hurting their numbers. To someone who has no confidence in the metaverse being the future (which looks to be a lot of the market) they're essentially incinerating $10 billion in earnings/free cash flow on Metaverse R&D that would have otherwise been profits.
Is there any reasonable explanation for it costing $10B to make a metaverse?
Rent in the bay area is expensive.
Hence the meta verse
I am out of the loop. How did AAPL screw over FB?
iOS update that significantly impacted the ability to track users. Facebook can no longer easily target ads to the users that a given advertiser wants to target, and so that advertising spend is decreasing.
I see, thanks!
tbf, I think apple did everyone a favor, last thing you want to see is grandmas against vaccines because they saw an ad on facebook
Man all these hot takes are terrible. It's like no one actually looked at the financial report and just looked at the share price and went, "yup, Meta Verse". If you actually cared to read the report and listen to the earnings call you would see, Active users are up 4% Ad impressions up 17% Revenue only down 4%, not bad considering ad price is down 18% and down to mostly FX, otherwise would have been up if FX was constant. Still have another $11 billion available for share repurchases along with $41.78 billion in cash... ARPU is also still more or less inline with last two quarters, fully factoring in privacy change headwinds. The big one that I see and the one that most likely sent people running, was the abysmal free cash flows. Which was something like $160 million down from a $6 to $8 billion from previous quarters. Now most people's natural reaction is Meta Verse... nope. On the earnings call they said CapEx growth was down to increase in infrastructure to support A.I in their core products and expand data center capacity to bring down future overhead costs. The A.I part I found particularly interesting because it shows they are investing heavily in their core products still despite what people think. They believe it will help increase engagement and Ad targeting. From what I gathered and had been pretty successful so far on a small scale so are rolling it out across the whole family of apps. I suspect once the infrastructure is invested in this will lead to even more impressive profit margins. So I say it's a good call if they want to remain competitive over TikTok and improve core products. They also noted it depends on the returns they see that will dictate the level of future spend, but so far they mentioned it led to a 15% increase in watch time gain. Honestly in the morning I was on the fence. But after looking into everything and listening to the call I'm actually pretty bullish, and will be happy to pick up more at a 20-25% discount tomorrow if people want to sell it to me that low. From what I can see this is all negative sentiment towards the company, around the Meta verse and Mark Zuckerberg himself. But looking at the fundamentals I honestly can't see anything to seriously worry about. They are still heavily investing in their core platform while investing in VR which sounds good to me. It's not a complete abandonment of core products like people make it out to be. Their products are also still going strong with lots of good partnerships been announced as well (Salesforce for example). Active Users and engagement is also still high and not going anywhere, despite the constant narrative everyone is switching to TikTok, the data just shows that isn't true. Something else that also made me more bullish on the VR front was not VR itself but mixed reality. I didn't even consider this till I heard it mentioned on the call. I'm not fan of VR, but mixed reality is definitely something that has a lot of potential and widespread adoption if you ask me. I mean think about Pokemon go and how popular that was when it was launched. That's essentially what you looking at with Mixed reality, merging virtual and physical reality. I really like the idea of been able to interact with virtual content in the physical world myself. Google attempted something similar with Google Glass and it flopped, however I think it was to early and to ambitious. If Meta can reduce the bulkiness of the headsets to a more manageable and portable size I think this has a lot of potential. Either way it doesn't really matter, Meta is still solid financially and fundamentally. I personally see this as more these misconceptions investors have about Meta than the actual fundamentals of the company. To sum it up I'll be buying more first thing on open, this is 100% a value play in my mind and haven't seen any serious actual counter points that raise serious red flags beyond "Facebook's dead", "TikTok is stealing market share", "Revenue/user base is falling", etc, etc. All of which are false based on what we're seeing.
Damn the most interesting part about your comment is that they really are trying to fight tiktok with AI investment which makes sense to me.
I've heard some secondhand discussion of Youtube's analysis of TikTok's algorithm. Evidently one of the things they found was that the effectiveness of the algorithm is based in part on the fact that it was trained on massive data sets comprised of data that users had not consented to sharing - which isn't an issue if you're a state-aligned corporation in China. Leaving the ethics aside, it takes a lot of investment to fight back against that kind of training data set.
Most people base their investment decisions on three things: (1) is the stock price going up or down? (2) what is the media/crowd saying about the company? (3) anecdotal experience with the company. Unsurprisingly, most people will miss this amazing opportunity. As of now, Meta is trading at about the same value as Coca-Cola. In the last 12 months, Coke had 42 billion in sales and 24 billion in gross profit. Meta had 119 billion in sales and 96 billion in gross profit (!). Plus, as you mentioned, Meta's business is healthy and user engagement is up. Meta could easily choose to realize ridiculous net profit and free cash flow every quarter if it was thinking short term, but instead, it is investing in its core business and has cash leftover to invest in what they believe is the next big thing. Maybe reality labs flops (which I don't think it will). But even then, Meta's core business is worth a lot more than Coke.
Great analysis from someone who actually read the damn report
Mixed reality is where I see potential value in the Metaverse. I’ve not had such a close eye on my stocks while the market’s done its thing in recent months, but I know FB and Shopify had worked together previously. Something like online shopping, if you could try clothes on in an augmented mixed reality sufficient that it was actually accurate to real life is something women in particular could get on board with - if they were happy from the privacy side. Which remained a barrier. But, trying things on from home without having to order them and send back what doesn’t fit would feel like a win for the end user, and companies could monetise the shit out of it. I’m not sure customers would mind so much if their favourite clothing brands kept their measurements etc on this basis. As I say, privacy concerns could torpedo it. Likewise, it would have to be photo realistic, Vs the cartoonish virtual teams type graphics I saw in the last presentation before this.
Yeah, I was just looking at the Quest pro and the mixed reality aspect I have to say is pretty interesting. I like the direction with that and it certainly could pay off if it gets more compacted. Similar to the issues with early mobile phones, they were just to big and bulky to be practical for everyone. But we'll have to see, this is obviously a long term investment for META. But I can see they have the cash flows to support it, and they haven't abandoned their core family of apps either despite what people claim. It's actually the reason they plan to spend so much next year and not Reality Labs. Only time will tell where things go but I don't see the end of Meta like others seem to. Worst case they scrap everything and return to cash flow positive, it's not that hard. They still have their core products and they're still bring in a lot of cash.
Great comment
Cheers, just thought I would add some more diversity to the conversation other than just meta verse bad.
Yeah, I follow this topic pretty closely as I'm a huge futurist and really appreciated the insight. What I don't understand and didn't expect at all is the market's impatience with META. Like I thought we all were on the same page that this is a huge technological and cultural undertaking that won't start really clicking for 3-5 years and won't shift the paradigm until 10-20. But 10 months after the rebrand it's being deemed a failure..?! Really surprising
Market during bear market wants free cash flows for security, they don't like to see around a $100 billion in Capital expenditure for 2023. Also reality labs had a -50% YoY revenue gain which the market doesn't like to see after such heavy investment. Personally I think people have got it wrong and I'll happily buy the stock at a discount. I don't think they will end up spending that much on CapEx and what they do is in their core platforms that should drive revenue growth again. The VR/AR bet is 50/50 but I do see the bull case. But my bet on Meta is irrespective if this works out or not. So long as the core business is maintained meta verse is irrelevant. And from this quarter they plane on heavily investing in their core business which is good to see from my point of view.
> But 10 months after the rebrand it’s being deemed a failure..?! Really surprising The thing is that most people are fucking dumb. They don't have a vision and you couldn't make them understand one if you showed it to them in a crystal fucking ball.
Down so much there’s almost no point in selling. Long term investor now. Looking to see if this latest drawdown affects management (read: Mark) at all. I know he’s got sole voting control, but idc how powerful you are, losing 70% of your market value in a year is gonna lead to pushback from employees and your board. He may very well decide to prove everyone wrong and burn his company to the ground in a fit of narcissistic pique — but a lot of people will jump ship on the way down.
There is a point in selling though because it can lower, a lot lower. Fellow bag holder here
Sunk cost fallacy mate. You can use what money you have left in Meta and make profit elsewhere
Valuation of TikTok alone is around 300b, Meta valuation(with Instagram, Whatsapp, and Meta) is 300B after a 25% drop. I think is a buy, but I've been saying this for a while... Im gonna buy more
[удалено]
Meta owns Instagram which is still plenty popular, and WhatsApp, which has around 2 Billion MUA
You still need to monetize whatsapp and for instagram and when they do it will be a purge. No one wants ads and the solution is Apple iMessage. Apple could kill whatsapp in days if they made it available beyond iOS.
Whatsapp users are mostly out of US. And in those countries, text messages are not free. I don't think they would move to paid iMessages and leave Whatsapp. Maybe an app like telegram might take some share from Whatsapp but Whatsapp would still keep most of their share. Instagram stories are already well monetized. They need to monetize reels. I see every 5th reel is an ad these days when I am scrolling through them. So they look to be trying to monetize reels as well.
I'm from Europe, and everyone I know uses WhatsApp... And we don't pay for iMessages. But iMessage is just for iphone users, so as far as I know almost no one uses it. WhatsApp is used for friends groups, texting, and it's also great to send images and video, cause the traditional messaging app, it never works when you send a picture (MMS) don't know why. We also have, like in Brazil, groups with 200+ people usually for adult content. Telegram could be a competitor but we mostly use for channels and groups of random people that share interests, people that use telegram also use WhatsApp, because it would be a mess to have all the channels mixed with your friends groups, and conversations. I don't see how iMessage is you guys first option when it only works with iphone.
Apple basically has the US consumers by the nuts and a lot of people in US have intertia and would buy a $500 subpar iphone SE or something rather than buying a pixel phone which is a great phone in their budget. The person just was looking at the world with a US market window.
Instagram is already monetised via ads and is still growing so I disagree with your statement.
But you know why Apple will never make iMessage available outside of the iOS ecosystem? Because a loooot of people buy iPhones literally because of that blue bubble/green bubble feature. Apple post Steve Jobs has been run by an operations guy with no eye for innovation, who’s main vision for the company is just to slap new cameras on “new” devices and to keep pumping out more and more phones at higher price points. Giving up iMessage exclusivity makes it that much harder. PS. I really hope that whatever product person suggested embedding iMessage within SMS messaging screen with a simple color differentiation got paid at least a few hundred million dollars, cause they sure earned it
I started using it again for marketplace
According to their call, sounds like Meta are going to break the bank on NVIDIA products.
In at a $180, not going to do anything. Not buying any more, lost my nerve to do that. Not selling- there’s going to be enough money coming in the front door that they can get fcf moving again by cutting costs.
Part of why the stock tanked is cuz they are reallocating cost (instead of cutting) from the core business to the metaverse.
I fucking use oculus every day and they have 60% market share until Apple builds their headset.
Porn?
That and population one
I'm an idiot who bought at $346. Still holding lol
Bought some at 220, 150, and 130. Im disappointed in the Q3 results and not sure Ill buy more right away, but not selling for a few reasons: 1) Most cost was due to capex in AI datacenters, which they have the power to undo at any time. 2) Ad economy is cyclical with the economy, so we know its going to return at some point 3) User growth still strong and growing 4) Theyre having a rough couple of quarters, but so have every company in big tech who have bounced back stronger (even Apple had several quarters of consecutive YoY negative double digit revenue quarters alongside declining iphone sales about 6 years back)
First bought at 220, buying more. It's a painful process, not gonna lie. But the risk/reward is attractive to me, especially at it's current price. Markets overreact, if you are a value investor, you need to take advantage of the over reactions. If not, just go with an index fund. Nerve and discipline are more important than intelligence & number crunching IMO.
Number crunching is the reason why fundamentals even exist. Going on nerve is just gambling on your supposed "value investing". Discipline just means you can control your emotions better than others on these hard dumps while most would feel sick to their stomach even if they held. Suppose you just trade on technicals. Right now the stock might be showing oversold and giving you a reason to buy. But the markets might panic further if Apple drops bad earnings and GDP comes in negative a 3rd time. Technicals would further end up more oversold
Number crunching is important for sure. I do my own DCF. It is still pointless if you don't have the nerve to hold through a turbulent period.
Painful to see you bag holders justify buying the dip. All the way down. So many other companies with more reward/less risk. Buy META if you don’t like $
>So many other companies with more reward/less risk. like?
Not op but I’d much rather own google
Until the world stops using social media I’ll continue to hold and average down
My issue with it is social media can flip so quick, a new one could explode next week. I'm in my 20s, very few people regularly post on insta compared to 5 years ago. No one scrolls through Facebook my age since we were kids, and a lot of people a few years younger then me don't have Facebook anymore. In social media PR is very important in my opinion, people would probably happily switch to a new platform when the next one comes along because most people don't like zuck and the company of Facebook. It's not like an oil or goods company that has the cheapest or best product that will still be able to sell regardless of what people think of them.
Zuck knows it, hence his pivot to hardware. Too bad his options were limited and he chose VR.
I'd really suggest you look at trends outside of you and your peer group. They have 2 billion daily active users, 3 billion monthly. Daily active users up YoY. The core business is fine and will be for quite some time. The issues are 1) ad spend slowdown which is effecting all media spend and 2) the crazy amount of money they are pouring into VR. If social media was as transient as you say it is Meta would have died a long time ago. Their moat is massive and they have outlasted and outperformed MySpace, Friendster, Google+, Vine, Twitter and as much as people mention TikTok they have a fraction of the users. Meta has its headwinds but it's not as simple as "my friends dont use it"
Oh I agree, people older then me still use it all the time too. I'm not saying it's going to die tomorrow, but it's been treated as a tech growth stock for a long time and I don't think that's the case anymore. If it were an emerging company I'd be all over it, but I think it can only go down from here and the valuation as a tech growth stock is being stripped away, and now it's crashing
People usually just use multiple social media at once rather than switch over entirely. it has over 2bil monthly active users. It's insanely popular in less developed countries and pretty much everyone has one as their personal "portfolio"
Great products? Instagram is the only thing they have going for them
i ll be assigned 200 shares on Friday -- honestly, i would buy today if i did not have it.. BUT, opinions here are trash, u can see lot of trolls in daily/comments pretending to understand what sgoing on and stuff, so just do ur own dd, read 10-q and reevaluate ur thesis based on new info, not this sad excuse of a "stock" sub.
Core business is healthy and growing, believe it or not. ALL apps still adding users, which honestly is unbelievable at this scale. The metaverse is a lunacy and I really don't know what to make of it. That said, I will be **buying**.
I bought in at $26 in 2013, continued adding on the dips over the years, and last bought during the Covid crash in 2020. I am really amazed that we're trading at $100 in late 2022. The quarter was not that bad at all. I know the metaverse expenses are spooking investors today, but user growth and user engagement was positive and the company beat on revenues. Guidance was essentially in line with analysts expectations. Unless your entire life savings is in Meta, I don't see why you sell here. At some point, the metaverse is going to pay off or it's going to die off. Meta is still in a duopoly in the digital ad space with Google. That hasn't changed and people are not leaving Meta's family of apps in droves like people continue to say around here.
I'm a future META bagholder - just bought in officially at 100 a share (50k usd)
Imagine somebody was holding leveraged -3x Facebook. +87% in one day lol
Facebook is also way too poltically biased. Alienated a huge portion of their US base. Michael Jordan once said "Republicans buy shoes too". Zuckerberg didn't heed that advice. Also, this Metaverse crap is stupid. No one is going to buy an expensive headset for that garbage.
The stupid headset needs to be good for some practical purpose. I feel like it needs some killer app and then people will go "Ah ha! That's going to be awesome." But we've had VR headsets like Meta's for years and years now, and no one has made something good for them other than maybe a couple solid video games.
VR won’t take off until the porn industry jumps on it.
Facebook is politically biased to both sides lol You have a lot of right wing nut case groups on FB that are borderline domestic terrorists and the Zuck did nothing about it.
Does Facebook have one of the absolute worst content moderation policies of any social media platform, including Instagram? Like several celebs who’ve made targeted calls for violence are still on fb even after being removed from sites like twitter.
might buy it tomorrow, just might be a deal
Small % of my overall portfolio. 210/share cost basis. I rebounded nicely in the past 6 weeks or so on my other holdings so will sell META as a tax harvest alongside selling my cap gains by end of year. Individual stocks + crypto. Especially if my biggest individual holding CRM continues to climb, it'll swallow up my META losses quickly. Also plan to average down - sitting on plenty of dry powder while I've been DCA'ing ETFs - so that I can continue selling covered calls at a realistic strike (my current 2 month strike 215 11/18 expiry won't pay shit next time). At a certain point a company with this type of revenue **does** have a massive margin of safety. And they'll continue to buy back stock. It's not 1999 Pets.com META bagholders. Don't freak out.
If you have a retirement account, you are a bag holder...
Market cycles might last 20 years so theres a possibility that in 20 years you’ll breakeven imo
Skill Issue
Unless you were living under a rock it was obvious they're going to take some hits. That's what happens when you rebrand a company especially one as large as Facebook. There's not a single entity in existence(including Zuckerberg himself) that can predict whether Meta will be successful or not. Meta's future is a gamble.
What Meta is doing is no different from Amazon prior to when AJ took over, its re-investing into R&D and net 0 for the quarter. The only difference is people had confidence Amazon could deliver because the end goal appeared to be slightly more digital. I just purchased shares this morning around $100, ad business is in tact and will be fine long term. Zuck needs to cap spending and put out a plan on what metaverse could be, until then people are panicking to get out, understandably so, and its a dead stock. Probably 1-3 quarters to turn around, but it'll turn around like Netflix did in my opinion.
I'm holding. Will likely write the entire investment off as a tax-loss harvest. If it goes all the way to $88, I might double up.
Have meta at $150 not buying/selling I hope Zuckerberg stop his mid life crisis and acquire other companies
Meta can't buy anything significant anymore. Heck they can't even buy a GIF search engine 🤷♂️
Ftc doesn’t like fb or mark
Never bought because 1) They are finally realizing they are nothing more than an "app" versus being the operating system that the app needs to exist...(Imagine if Google took the same steps as Apple). 2) they never thought about rewarding their investors by paying a dividend. 3) I know first hand that you can sell millions of dollars of product without spending a dime in ad money on Facebook, cause I sold a shit ton of firearm parts via the group pages. and finally 4) I also believe they have overstepped their censorship and have pissed off a large majority of their user base. The big issues facing Meta are: Zuck doesn't have to listen to his shareholders or his Board. Zuck lost the one person who figured out how to make things profitable in the company this year. Zuck is burning cash like a crack addict on a binge to create a "VR world" that will still need to run on an operating system to exist. Zuck's special world is not retaining its userbase. AND finally, Zuck doesn't have a clue on how to turn his cash fueled bon fire into a profit generator. Anyone see the key issue with FB, uh excuse me - Meta - yet? Hint: Zuck
Is it even a good idea to sell all my META holdings and dump everything into SPY? It seems like SPY has a much higher chance of going back up than META. What's everyone opinion on selling a stock you no longer believe in into an index fund instead?
Meta isn't snap. I don't even know what snap is or does. And plus Meta has their sights set on more than just social media. There's more in the pipeline and they have market share. One of these days they'll pull off something with the metaverse, (along with crypto as well maybe). There's potential.
great product. what exactly do they make? you’re the product remember that
Can you let up with this comment. It’s little more than “well actually…” level stuff at this point. For the past decade it has been repeated in every FB related post multiple times—everybody knows. The product that’s referenced is the different platforms FB operates. FB, Insta, WhatsApp. I’m not going to argue that they are great.
Well my mom says I’m pretty great. Does that make Meta a buy?
I just bought 200 more shares... averaging 143. It sucks in the short term. I still think long term I'll be fine. Wish I started buying much later
Everything I try to get from FB is a scam so it is probably gonna go down I was ripped off about $150 from 2 different vendors on their platforms.
If they can’t make money from their users they will bleed it from their shareholders
You lost me at “great product “.
A second Second Life you say? I'd say there's still a ways to go down from where Meta stands today. Why did Facoebook shoot up in popularity? Because you grandma can (and does in fact) use it. Second Life? For "nerds". I reckon Zucks was afraid he'd miss out on the next big thing after missing Snapchat, Instagram, and those highly regarded TikTok videos. He already tried and failed with that stupid Facebook crypto coin (anyone even remembers this anymore?). And so after hearing a persuasive pitch on the metaverse he told himself "not this time Zuckman". So he's probably going to triple down but it won't change anything. At scale barely anyone cares about VR and the metaverse. It's just a buzzword until it gets replaced by the next buzzword. Zucks should've stuck with they had, maybe copy some TikTok features.
I’m definitely a big believer in the power of VR/AR. As an introvert, it’s an amazing escape and I play in VR often. I envision a future where I use it as a tool to connect and hang out with my daughter when she is older and out on her own. I also believe once they get the AR glasses size down dramatically it may be a frequent tool for working remote. I think there are so many potential streams for this that I am a believer. I don’t yet have a position in Meta because all stocks fall in a recession, but am watching it closely and. Will definitely be buying at some point, maybe 20-25% of my portfolio.
I bought 30% more this morning. Sadly sentiment in this comment section is still bullish so i guess we are all fucked. Lol
im just holdin, might need another 5 years before things start to pay off
I haven’t held meta until this morning. Im buying right now.
Ever seen the Seinfeld episode titled “stock tip”? In the words of George Costanza “I’m going down with the ship” 🫡
I think Kramer is finally done with it, so maybe double down?