The billionaire battle for the metaverse
Forget space. The race is on to take people beyond reality
YOU HAVE to hand it to Mark Zuckerberg. When the founder of Facebook announced in October that he was changing the name of the social-media network’s parent company to Meta Platforms in order to help create an alternative digital reality known as the metaverse, he was mercilessly mocked. To some, he was generating a smokescreen to distract attention from a political furore. To others, he was merely the latest middle-aged tech billionaire to chase a childhood fantasy, much as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Tesla’s Elon Musk were doing with space rockets.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Lords of the metaverse”
From the December 18th 2021 edition
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