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Comment by dpflan | Hacker News Reader

What is the breakdown for how this money is being used/spent? Understandably AR/VR is costly (hardware, software, etc), but I am wondering what percentage of this money is going to the AI research that can certainly help AR/VR but also be used in other contexts (as in the research allocated to AR/VR can be multi-purpose and not really a pure loss).

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Yeah I'd like to know.

The article keeps framing it as "The metaverse division" and "sink billions of dollars a quarter into developing the metaverse"... but Reality Labs (basically Oculus) doesn't just do stupid metaverse/horizon-blah, they make the actual Quest. So I expect a decent chunk of this was the cost of developing their two recent hardware upgrades. I believe they may be back to selling at or below cost again, so part of that loss could also be a strategic loss for future market share.

If more of it actually went into the metaverse nonsense then that's truly abominable, but the article presents no evidence for this. It seems like all of the media still doesn't realise the Quest is primarily a gaming platform and horizon is just a stupid side project Zuckerberg has forced upon them, to everyone who actually uses them this framing just seems ridiculous.

Since we're talking about billions of dollars here, I'd like to know how far down the production stack they are investing. The displays, optics, and processors in headsets are hungry for technological advances. So is Meta custom building meta-material grown silicon lenses (or other crazy sci fi stuff), or are they just trying to commercialize other peoples breakthroughs at the lowest levels?

I suspect it's the latter, although I fail to even wrap my head around how the heck fundamental technological advances even happen. I mean you have people far removes from commercialization that pour a lot of time, money, knowledge and material into making this obscure little facet a tiiiny bit better. How do you even get to know what to improve, what needs improving, what _can_ be improved? How the heck do you even get funding for something so so very speculative?

Actually, is Meta strategically using this for loss write-offs/tax evasion/tricky balance sheet mechanics/financial engineering?

-- EDIT --

Thank you tomxor for entertaining a possible answer.

Oh yes, just burn all the money so they can use it as a tax write-off?

Does anyone really know how these tax write-offs work? People just use the term without any clear understanding.

Meta like any sane company out there will probably use every rule to avoid (not evade) paying tax. Thats good for the shareholders. But this isn't one such measure, it's mostly R&D expenditure.

It works as a tax free investment. So long as it actually pays off in the future, they get to skip tax by putting it straight into R&D now instead of tomorrow. Another thing they did was sell hardware below cost, so the public kind of benefit - but at the same time FB potentially benefit by undercutting competition and gaining market share... One way of framing that last one might be "Deciding how their tax is spent so that it might benefit Facebook" - from that perspective it doesn't seem like a bad idea (purely from the business side, not public interest) to burn the tax yourself for a little more control.

You cant save money by losing money. Metas tax rate is 17%, write offs are still loses.

Spoken like the average armchair accountant.

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