Meta

Meta (formerly Facebook) is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads, and the largest corporate investor in metaverse and VR technology. Under CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Meta rebranded in 2021 to signal its strategic pivot toward building the metaverse — a bet that has cost tens of billions of dollars through its Reality Labs division.

Reality Labs and Quest

Meta's Reality Labs division builds the Quest line of VR/MR headsets, which dominate the consumer VR market with an estimated 70%+ market share. Meta Quest 3 introduced mixed reality capabilities at an accessible price point, while Quest Pro targeted enterprise and developer use cases. Despite cumulative losses exceeding $50 billion in Reality Labs, Meta has maintained its investment thesis that spatial computing is the next major computing platform — and that owning the hardware is essential to avoiding dependence on Apple or Google's platforms.

Horizon Worlds and Social VR

Horizon Worlds is Meta's social VR platform — a virtual world where users create spaces, socialize, and interact through avatars. While adoption has been slower than Meta initially projected, the platform represents the most ambitious attempt by a major technology company to build a social metaverse from scratch. The creator economy within Horizon, including monetization tools for world-builders, echoes the patterns seen in Roblox and Fortnite.

Open-Source AI

Meta has become the most significant corporate contributor to open-source AI through its LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI) family. LLaMA models have spawned an enormous ecosystem of fine-tuned variants and applications, positioning Meta as the counterweight to the closed-model approaches of OpenAI and Anthropic. This open-source strategy builds ecosystem lock-in through a different mechanism: developer adoption and community dependency.

The Social Graph Advantage

Meta's ownership of the world's largest social graph — nearly 4 billion monthly active users across its family of apps — gives it unique advantages in AI training data, advertising targeting, and metaverse adoption. The social graph is the connective tissue that could make Meta's metaverse vision work: people go where their friends are.