The day the future became the past arrived quietly. Meta has shut down Horizon Worlds on VR — off the Quest store in March, terminated on all VR devices by June 15 — converting the proclaimed future of human digital experience into a historical footnote. After close to $80 billion in losses, Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse — the future that was going to define the next decade of human life — has become the past that defined his most expensive mistake.
The transition from future to past was not a single moment but a progression. The future was declared in 2021, with the Meta rebrand and the billion-user projection. The questioning of the future began shortly after, as user numbers failed to grow and losses accumulated. The doubting of the future intensified through 2022 and 2023, as the cultural mockery of the platform’s visual style and sparse population became increasingly pointed. The past was formalized in early 2025, with layoffs and the AI pivot that made the transition official.
Horizon Worlds was the product that was supposed to be the present manifestation of the future — the thing you could use right now to experience the metaverse that would eventually reach a billion users. Instead, it became the product that was used by a few hundred thousand people and then shut down. The future it represented did not materialize in the form or at the pace that justified the investment. What was the future is now the past.
Reality Labs’ close to $80 billion in losses mark the cost of maintaining the future designation longer than the evidence supported. Layoffs of more than 1,000 employees and the AI pivot complete the transition to past. The energy and resources that maintained the future are now directed toward AI — the technology that has claimed the future designation that the metaverse once held.
The day the future became the past is not a failure of imagination — it is the evidence that imagined futures and realized futures are different things. The most expensive imagined futures in technology history have cost far less than Zuckerberg’s. Close to $80 billion is the record, and it belongs to the day the metaverse’s future became its past.