10 billion yearly losses for something that by all accounts isn't close to magically becoming profitable. It honestly just seems like something he thinks is cool and therefore dumps money in.
To be fair, though; Facebook, I mean, Meta is a publicly-traded company and if the shareholders get tired of not seeing any ROI from Meta's VR initiatives, then this could compel Zuck to stop. Even Zuck isn't free from business pressures if the funding is coming from Meta and not out of Zuck's personal funds.
Back to Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, my understanding of how they worked is that while management did set the overall direction, researchers were given very wide latitude when pursuing this direction with little to no pressure to deliver immediate results and to show that their research would lead to profits. Indeed, at one point AT&T was forbidden by the federal government from entering businesses outside of their phone business, and in the case of Xerox PARC, Robert Taylor was able to negotiate a deal with Xerox executives where Xerox's executives wouldn't meddle in the affairs of PARC for the first five years. (Once those five years ended, the meddling began, culminating with Bob Taylor's famous exit in 1983.)
Since he has 57% of the votes, he can tell everyone to pound sand.
if it become the case, meta get 30% of the revenues associated with it.
If it does not, i'm pretty sure they can now make good smartphones and even have a dedicated os. I'm pretty sure they can find a way to make money with it.
A meta quest 3s in inself is an insane experience for 330€ and it's current main disadvantages for gaming are the lack of players and the catalogue size. Even using it as a main monitor with a bluetooth keyboard is "possible". I would have find it 'improbable' a few years ago even as an enthousiasth, i now could totally imagine a headset replacing my screen in a few years with a few improvements on.