A list of business and technological wonders built for a tiny fraction of the amount Facebook is spending on the metaverse
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Meta's losses from its Reality Labs project total nearly $20 billion since last year, with no end in sight.
Many investors were surprised to learn that Meta plans to spend even more on the metaverse in 2023.
Put into perspective, the losses have grown to more than the combined market caps of 4 major US airline companies.
Meta's losses from its metaverse project keep stacking up.
The tech giant reported $10 billion in losses from the project last year and now more than $9 billion as of the third quarter of 2022. The company said it plans to ramp up spending even further next year.
Meta has said it's spending this massive amount of money on research, development, and employee-related costs, but the precise details of where that money has gone are fuzzy.
Meta's piling losses have come under intense scrutiny after some found CEO Mark Zuckerberg's most recent update on the company's progress disappointing. One analyst called the company's push into the metaverse "desperate."
The hefty price tag on Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse project appears even more substantial when it's put into perspective.
Here are other incredible things that cost less than the amount Meta has reported as losses on its Reality Labs project since last year.
So far, Meta's losses from Reality Labs have ballooned to more than the total market caps of American Airlines, JetBlue, Spirit, and Frontier Airlines combined.
These airlines have seen significant cuts to their market caps this year, due to the market downturn. Still, the combined market caps for these four airlines currently total $14.75 billion.
It would cost less to buy both the Dallas Cowboys and the New England Patriots, which are the two most valuable sports franchises in the entire world, according to Forbes.
Forbes recently estimated the cost of the Cowboys to be $8 billion, and the Patriots to be $6.4 billion, totalling $14.4 billion.
Or, if you want more bang for your buck, it would cost less than $20 billion to buy the Brooklyn Nets ($3.2 billion), the Arizona Cardinals ($3.27 billion), the LA Clippers ($3.3 billion), and the Buffalo Bills ($3.4 billion). All four are also considered some of the world's most expensive sports teams, according to Forbes.
Meta's Reality Labs losses total more than the GDP of many small countries.
The World Bank's most recent GDP estimates put Jamaica's GDP at $13.6 billion, and Armenia's at $13.8 billion.
The average salary for a public school teacher is $65,090 in the US, according to the Department of Education.
$20 billion could pay the salaries of 307,266 teachers for one year. Or one teacher's salary for 307,266 years!
Source: National Center for Education Statistics
It would cost less to buy the 10 most expensive pieces of art ever sold, which includes works by Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Picasso.
The 10 most expensive works of art sold only come to a little more than $2.5 billion in total.
The Mona Lisa was assessed at a value of $100 million in 1962, which would be $860 million in 2022. You could buy 23 Mona Lisas with $20 billion.
The White House is valued at nearly $400 million, according to real-estate listings firm Zillow.
Meta's losses for Reality Labs are 50x more money than that.
Source: Insider
Funding Uber for its first four years of operation cost less than $20 billion.
In the first four years of Uber, the company raised $13,519,400,000, according to Pitchbook. The company currently has a market cap of nearly $50 billion.
The first ever computer cost $400,000 to complete in 1945.
The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC, was developed in Philadelphia and cost a paltry $6.088 million if you adjust for inflation.
The current US population is 332,403,650.
Meta's Reality Labs endeavor has so far lost the equivalent of $60 for every person in the US.
Developing both the Hubble Space Telescope and the new James Webb Telescope cost the US government less than $20 billion.
Hubble's development cost $1.5 billion by its launch in 1990. In today's dollars, that would be about $3.4 billion. Webb, which released its first images in July, cost approximately $10 billion. Webb was originally estimated to cost between $1 billion to $3.5 billion but was delayed and went over budget.
Even so, the cost of the two telescopes combined would be less than Meta's losses from Reality Labs.
The world's most expensive burger is $5,000. You could buy 4 million of them (excluding taxes).
The burger features wagyu beef, seared foie gras, and black truffle shavings. It's also served with a bottle of 1995 Chateau Petrus from Bordeaux. Enjoy!
The military costs for the entire American Revolutionary War were less than $20 billion, adjusting for inflation.
A 2011 report from the Congressional Research Service on military costs from major US wars estimated that the American Revolution cost $2.407 billion, in 2011 dollars. Eleven years later, that would come to about $3.18 billion.
Read the original article on Business Insider
