Everyone buried the metaverse the day Zuckerberg's avatar had no legs. Congratulations, you buried it alive. Beyond the standalone AR market sits the wider immersive economy, and it is far bigger.
I called the Zuckerberg way a mega misstep on 31 October 2021, 3 days after the rebrand, in a post 3.2 million people read. Wrong timing: his core audience had already left Facebook for TikTok. Wrong hardware: nobody wants a flat-screen TV strapped to their nose. Wrong infrastructure: the compute and the networks were years away. Wrong ethics: a new name does not clean an old reputation. Tens of billions burned later, the scoreboard agrees. In Hebrew, Meta means dead. I kid you not.
I forecast the metaverse economy, VR, AR, XR, mixed reality, plus virtual goods, e-commerce, and services, reaches $5 trillion by 2030. McKinsey's own model now lands on the same number. The suits caught up to the call, they just charge $500 an hour to repeat it.
This is not about strapping a headset to your face. It is about immersive experiences becoming a layer of daily commerce and culture, exactly like the mobile internet did. The picks and shovels are being laid now: Meta's Reality Labs, Apple's Vision line, Nvidia's Omniverse, Snap's optics, Niantic's map of the real world.
The companies building this stack today are the giants of the 2030s. Most people are still laughing at the headsets. They laughed at the smartphone too. Once.
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