Meta Has Finally Figured Out How To Sell The Metaverse

The last time Mark Zuckerberg signaled plans to open his wallet, his shareholders bailed. What a difference two years makes.

- Dan Gallagher

Meta Platforms saw its share price jump 20% Friday following strong fourth-quarter results that included a significantly boosted share buyback and the company’s first-ever dividend. It was a significant bump for a stock that had already nearly tripled in value during 2023. The recent gains have also put Meta’s market value back above $1 trillion, in the rarefied ranks of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, and Google-parent Alphabet.

The company once known as Facebook was unceremoniously booted from that club in late 2021 when Zuckerberg first started signaling his interest in the metaverse, loosely defined as a virtual world accessed mainly through virtual and augmented reality devices. Shareholder worries grew as the company took drastic steps that included changing its name to Meta and boosting its annual capital-expenditure, or capex, budget by nearly 80%. Virtual reality had so far been a dud of an industry. But as Facebook's chief executive officer and controlling shareholder, Zuckerberg had little to stop him from chasing the dream.