Unfortunately, the Metaverse happened during the COVID bubble, so there was no shareholder discipline then. Meta did crash after interest rates went up - there were large layoffs - but then they got a boost to their stock due to their AI strategy, which seemed competitive until Llama 4 in early 2025, although they were never on the frontier. Even since then they’ve been burning a ton of cash on AI with no discernible results.

The private equity strategy of putting Meta into maintenance mode and focusing purely on their social media business would have been much better.