04. Technology — The Metaverse and Mobile Money

Overrated · The metaverse

Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta in 2021, betting the whole company on VR/AR as the next computing platform. Meta's Reality Labs division posted a $16.1 billion operating loss in fiscal year 2023. That loss grew from $13.7 billion in fiscal year 2022, a year-on-year increase. Revenue against it was just under $1.9 billion in FY2023, a fraction of the loss. Meta itself said it expects Reality Labs' losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year, several years into the bet. Reality Labs crossed $1 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time in Q4 2023, with Quest 3 described as a strong seller.

Underrated · Mobile money (M-Pesa)

Tavneet Suri and William Jack published a long-run panel study of Kenya's M-PESA system in Science in 2016. Access to mobile money lifted 194,000 households — 2% of all Kenyan households — out of poverty. The service induced roughly 185,000 women to shift from farming into business or retail occupations. By the time of the study, at least one person in 96% of Kenyan households used mobile money. The service runs over basic SMS, on a cheap phone, with no internet connection required.

The gap

The metaverse is easy to see: a renamed company, a keynote, a headset launch, a stock-price story. Mobile money is easy to miss: a USSD menu on a cheap phone, with no press event and no rebrand. Meta disputes the "failure" framing; Zuckerberg calls it a long-term platform bet, not a closed verdict. Suri and Jack's own paper notes the exact mechanism behind the consumption rise is not fully pinned down, though the poverty-reduction topline is undisputed.

Example: One product renamed a company and lost $16.1 billion in a single year; the other never renamed anything and moved 2% of a country's households out of poverty.

Verdict. The metaverse's visibility has outrun its measured return by several years running; M-Pesa's measured return has outrun its visibility for a decade.

Overturned if: Reality Labs' revenue growth overtakes its losses on a sustained basis, or a comparable study finds M-Pesa's poverty effect does not hold outside Kenya.

Sources. 2024 · Chris Kerr, "Meta lost $16.1 billion on its big metaverse bet during 2023," Game Developer — gamedeveloper.com · 2016 · Tavneet Suri & William Jack, "The Long-Run Poverty and Gender Impacts of Mobile Money," Science, 354(6317), 1288–1292 — science.org