A bored Zuckerberg has come up with an announcement that will shake not only Facebook, but perhaps even the entire Meta

Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has spent more than the last decade overseeing Facebook (now Meta) into the everyday lives of users. But only yesterday, he revealed something on Joe Rogan's podcast that could be really worrying for many investors in the company...

Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan's podcast

On Thursday, two men famous for running giant platforms on which misinformation and conspiracies are spread spoke to each other on a podcast. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta and the man behind Facebook, and Joe Rogan spoke for nearly three hours in a wide-ranging interview on Rogan's podcast that focused on virtual reality, social media censorship and politics.

The pair spent most of the first half of the podcast talking about Zuckerberg's focus on VR and the so-called metaverse. Zuckerberg's vision of his metaverse not only seemed far-fetched, but disturbingly suggested an image of a CEO chasing something that seems easier than politics and moderating Facebook content.

Zuckerberg claimed that VR has a penetration rate "on par with Playstation or Xbox," and imagined a future where people wear a headset in a coffee shop. He also said that many physical objects in the real world will one day be replaced by holograms. "We could deal hologram cards to each other and play poker and you could have a poker night where some of your friends and some of them could be holograms," he said.

Zuckerberg's avatar for Horizon Worlds

Bored Zuckerberg

Much has been said about Facebook's turn to VR and whether or not it's a good idea, and why it did it in the first place. Zuckerberg didn't offer much of substance on the subject, but he strongly hinted that running Facebook with all the complicated, world-altering decisions around moderation that it entails... just isn't that much fun.

"You wake up in the morning, you look at my phone, you get about a million messages... Most of the time it's not good," Zuckerberg said in one of the most human moments of the interview. "It's almost like every day you wake up and get punched in the stomach."

Facebook has come to mean so many things to so many different people. It's a window into our families' lives, a way to keep up with friends, a place for memes, but also a toxic stew of hate speech, extremism and bizarre ads. Zuckerberg is ultimately responsible for all of this.

"It's questions of values, around what do you value more? Those are super tricky questions. Part of what I've struggled with around that is... I didn't go into this to essentially judge these things. I went into it to design technology that helps people connect," Zuckerberg said.

He explained that the metaverse fits the bill. "I guess you can say that when we spent the first hour talking about the metaverse and the future of building an entire technology roadmap to give people a realistic sense of presence, that's what I'm here for," he said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN3PIGLDscQ

All in all, Zuckerberg's appearance was rather tame, but painted a picture of a man eager to deflect responsibility, if things keep going the way they are, then the $META metaverse will have as many problems as Facebook.

What's even more frightening, though, is its momentary relationship with Facebook itself. It's abundantly clear from the podcast that Zuckerberg hates working at Facebook, and that he'd rather focus on a completely different industry as the company's CEO. But the problem is that Meta, still earns revenue primarily by selling ad space on its social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

Metaverse won't be profitable for Meta for a long time to come and that scares me personally as an investor in the company and convinces me to rather withdraw my investment. Especially when the founder and CEO is willing to publicly admit that he has no intention of focusing on the company's main sources of revenue in the future.

This is nothing against the potential of Metaverse, on the contrary, I myself think it is a sector with great potential that should be invested in. But unfortunately, I'm not convinced that $META stock will respond well to this rapid transition of the company's business model in the short term.

DISCLAIMER: I am not an investment professional, just a biased retail investor, so this is not an investment recommendation.