Since 2020 Meta's Reality Labs has lost about $92 billion: $83.6 billion from 2020 to 2025 and another $8.6 billion in the first half of 2026. In 2025 alone it lost $19.2 billion on just $2.2 billion of revenue. Here is how the metaverse bet grew from a $299 Quest 2 into a division losing about $39 million a day, why Meta cut about 10 percent of Reality Labs in January 2026, and why Ray-Ban Meta glasses, with more than 7 million AI glasses sold in 2025, became the new plan.
Sources: Meta Form 10-K and earnings release (January 28, 2026), Meta earnings release (April 29, 2026), Meta earnings release (July 29, 2026), CNBC (January 24, 2026), The Verge (January 13, 2026), EssilorLuxottica results via Bloomberg (February 11, 2026), Bloomberg (January 13, 2026), TechCrunch (January 29, 2026), CNBC Quest Pro reporting (October 2022 and March 2023).
Photo credits: Mark Zuckerberg at F8 2018 and 2019: Anthony Quintano, CC BY 2.0. Oculus Quest 2: Maximilian Prandstätter, CC BY 2.0. Meta headquarters, Menlo Park: InvadingInvader, CC BY-SA 4.0. Ray-Ban Meta glasses: ItzANormalFioko, CC BY-SA 3.0. Meta and Ray-Ban logos: public domain. All via Wikimedia Commons.
Some scenes are illustrative AI generated visuals. No generated faces of named people.
