Meta's Metaverse cost more than

the Apollo Moon program.
$46.5 billion on Reality Labs from 2020 to 2025.
The entire Apollo program cost $42 billion (adjusted).
They spent $4.5 billion more than it took
to put humans on the moon.
And got a virtual avatar that couldn't
grow legs for two years.
The cost per user math is insane:
Horizon Worlds: $232,500 per user
Instagram at acquisition: $33 per user
That's a 7,045x difference.
Zuckerberg renamed the entire company for this.
Told Wall Street VR was the future of computing.
It wasn't. AI was.
Meta Horizon Worlds shuts down June 15, 2026.
Now Meta is quietly the #2 AI lab in the world
and pretending the detour never happened.
$46.5 billion.
Nobody got fired for it.