In 2021, as a whistleblower emerged with dramatic allegations that Facebook was harming children, CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a rebuttal on Facebook. “We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health. It’s difficult to see coverage that misrepresents our work and our motives,” he wrote in a note to Meta staff, which he reposted publicly. “At the most basic level, I think most of us just don’t recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted.”
Away from the stream of often inane public replies, one reader didn’t like what they saw. Zuckerberg spoke with the unidentified person privately on WhatsApp, according to exhibits later released as part of a series of lawsuits, and the figure urged Zuckerberg — a parent himself — to make child safety even more central in his messaging. “i am not saying facebook is duplicitous and evil,” they wrote. “i am saying the opposite, you have heard the chorus and will PERSONALLY make this issue over adolescents your issue.”
In the privacy of the conversation, Zuckerberg was candid. “I care deeply about this and we’ll continue focusing on being industry-leading with young people,” he responded, “but I’m not going to say it’s my personal main focus when I have a number of other areas I’m more focused on like building the metaverse.”
Zuckerberg later reiterated that “I personally care about this.” But he appeared ambivalent, nudging his conversation partner away from older concerns and toward his vision for the future. “How do you think this fits with our focus on promoting building the metaverse as the next major opportunity?” he asked. “That’s not at odds with safety, but it’s a much different and more innovation-focused message.” Weeks later, Zuckerberg made a huge announcement: The company was changing its name to Meta in honor of its newest, most important priority.
Years after that conversation, online child safety concerns have ballooned — while if anybody’s talking about the Metaverse, it’s likely as a multibillion-dollar money sink where nobody has legs. But the exchange is a microcosm of how Zuckerberg has run Meta, a sprawling online empire worth well over a trillion dollars: by always chasing the next big opportunity. Facebook’s motto was once, famously, “Move fast and break things.” Its new one might be closer to Move fast, break things, move on.
For two decades, Meta’s products have been at the center of what people do online. But Meta now finds itself besieged on all sides. Lawsuits have piled up as regulators turn on social media. A push into smart glasses has triggered a mountain of negative press and backlash — including the pejorative moniker “pervert glasses.” The company remains firmly behind in the AI race. Public perception of Zuckerberg himself has curdled.
Yet Meta is far from finished. It maintains a growing, highly profitable social media business. It’s dominant in AI-powered smart glasses, what many tech leaders consider the next mobile computing platform. It’s defused potential regulatory threats. And its latest platform, a “personal AI agent” dubbed Muse, was released in early September, giving Zuckerberg his next metaverse-like project.
Muse is Zuckerberg’s latest bid to reinvent the company. Early numbers for Muse are promising; an Apptopia estimate this week indicates it’s got over 600,000 daily active users in the US, shooting it to the top of the iOS App Store charts. Yet the question remains: Can a company synonymous with safety and privacy debacles become the AI-powered voice in everyone’s ear?
The glasses gamble
When Zuckerberg took the stage at Facebook Connect to announce that one of the most recognizable names in tech was getting a new identity, he was planting a flag. Facebook, the social media company known for its “big blue app”? That was the past. The future of the internet was the metaverse, an immersive 3D space where digital avatars could socialize, work, and collaborate, built on a virtual reality headset the company acquired in 2014. And after the covid pandemic’s mass shutdowns of physical space, Facebook believed in the metaverse so much that it would rebuild its entire identity around the niche world of virtual and augmented reality.
Nearly five years later, Meta’s Reality Labs division has accumulated over $80 billion in operating losses. It kicked off this year by cutting roughly 10 percent of that division, shuttering three VR studios, discontinuing the metaverse for work, and announcing it’d be shutting down Horizon Worlds, its flagship metaverse experience, on VR headsets. Meta has since decided to keep Horizon Worlds going after public backlash, but it’s clear that Zuckerberg’s colossal gamble on VR hasn’t paid off.
But to call Meta’s investment an abandoned boondoggle isn’t quite accurate either. Meta dominates the nascent but growing smart glasses market, perhaps its biggest success story in recent years. The metaverse may not be the future of computing, but its augmented reality ambitions could still pay off.
Few expected the Ray-Ban Meta glasses to take off when they launched in 2023. After all, Meta’s first attempt, the Ray-Ban Stories in 2021, was a bona fide flop. Ninety percent of owners left the glasses to rot in their drawers. But improvements to cameras in the next-generation hardware helped Meta to sell roughly 2 million units — surprising even Zuckerberg. By the end of 2025, EssilorLuxottica — Meta’s partner in building these devices — had sold an additional 7 million units. All told, Meta and EssilorLuxottica reported that smart glasses sales doubled in Q2 of 2026.
Few expected the Ray-Ban Meta glasses to take off — but their success has surprised even Zuckerberg
Most importantly, Zuckerberg and Meta leadership view this tech as the perfect vehicle for the company’s latest, shiniest interest: its AI investments. So much so that Meta is aggressively trying to brand these as AI glasses.
“I think in the future, if you don’t have glasses that have AI — or some way to interact with AI — I think you’re probably [going to] be at a pretty significant cognitive disadvantage compared to other people and who you’re working with or competing against,” Zuckerberg said in a 2025 earnings call.
Meta is still funneling billions into the AR space without profit, but that’s not necessarily disastrous. “There’s no true way to tell if [Meta] is successful or not. You could measure market share, and they absolutely have that, but that still doesn’t speak to profitability or if the spending to date is justified,” says Jitesh Ubrani, research director at IDC, noting that the runway for XR — the umbrella term for virtual, augmented, and mixed reality — is a notoriously long one.
VR and the metaverse also had long runways that never paid off. But right now, the smart glasses market is building momentum, making it far too early to say whether it’s doomed to the same fate.
Looking at what numbers do exist, Meta is the undisputed king. According to IDC, Meta commands 69.2 percent of the smart glasses and headset market as of Q2 2026. That number jumps up to 76 percent of AI glasses without displays. That said, Ubrani argues that it’s unlikely that any company will see a return on investment in the next five years. It’s possible, he says, that could take as long as 25 years. Absent profit, the next best measure of success is often determined by who can afford to stay in the game long enough — while ignoring demanding investors — to influence the next chapter.
“In the XR market, I’d say that [Meta] is the leader in every segment they play in,” says Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. That can be a double-edged sword, though. “They’ve both been a steward of the XR and AR space, but they’ve also limited its potential because they control the platform, the spending, and they decided who were the winners and the losers by investing with their dollars.”
Both Sag and Ubrani also agree that Meta wouldn’t currently be the leader in smart glasses or a major player in AI if not for its early, if flawed, investments in VR.
Meta’s success on this front has kicked off a race among tech companies. Google is pushing its Android XR platform, working with Samsung to launch several “intelligent eyewear” products later this year. Bloomberg has reported that Apple is also working on a pair. Outside the major players, there are dozens of Ray-Ban dupes from smaller companies. Again, Ubrani says it’s difficult to put hard numbers on how much tech companies are pouring into this space — but whatever the cost, the prize is winning what Silicon Valley sees as the next big mobile computing platform.
Ubrani points to the smart glasses supply chain, where “one player who’s willing to invest no matter where the market is going” has massively changed the game. He contrasts that approach with Google, which retreated after criticism of its own glasses over a decade ago. “When people didn’t like [Google Glass], they scaled back significantly, and that in a sense, hurt the entire industry. Now with Meta, we’re seeing that even if Meta’s not making money, the industry is still moving forward.”
“Even if Meta’s not making money, the industry is still moving forward.”
On paper, it might seem Meta’s already won the battle for the next mobile computing platform. At least, if Meta weren’t Meta. While the company gained serious momentum in 2024 and 2025, it’s attracted a public backlash largely of its own making. Meta pushed its glasses as a way to make content for Instagram and other platforms, but failed to account for how bad actors might misuse its products. Online pickup artists and pranksters have started using the devices to harass women and retail workers, resulting in the “pervert glasses” label. The resulting videos are pushed to social media, where they effectively publicize the tech’s most troubling aspects. All this stokes roughly a decade’s worth of privacy concerns stemming from indiscriminate data collection, breaches, and advertising practices. It’s not just that Meta perhaps underestimated how its products could be misused. It already built a reputation for not taking privacy seriously.
In recent months, activists have launched guerrilla campaigns in major cities by “remixing” Meta’s own marketing, painting smart glasses users as privacy threats.
Meta has tried to demonstrate that it cares about privacy. “If people aren’t comfortable with you wearing the glasses, not only do we personally think that’s bad, but we wouldn’t have a business anymore,” Alex Himel, Meta’s VP of wearables, recently told The Verge ahead of a mandatory update that makes it harder to disable the LED light that alerts people that the headset is recording. Instagram head Adam Mosseri has also recently said Meta will take down prank videos captured with the Ray-Ban glasses.
But these have been largely reactive policies. For the public, they look more like attempts to distract from unflattering news that feeds into Meta’s notorious privacy reputation. The New York Times reported that Meta intended to launch facial recognition software during political unrest to throw off privacy advocates. That was soon followed by a Wired report that said Meta had shipped — but not activated — this facial recognition tech to millions of glasses. Rounding out the trifecta was a Financial Times report that Meta is working on “super sensing glasses” that will be able to see what you’re doing 24/7. Andrew Nazdin, director of Glasgow Actions Team, one of the groups behind the guerrilla campaigns, says it would be “foolish for us to let them police themselves instead of calling on society to reject this [tech].”
It’s too soon to say if this backlash has hurt Meta’s smart glasses ambitions. Ubrani says we likely won’t see any impact on sales — if there is one — until the holiday season. Even so, analysts aren’t convinced Meta’s bad reputation is enough to derail its hopes for smart glasses.
“Meta’s done a very poor job of talking about privacy and setting the right tone,” acknowledges Sag. “But it’s funny because if you go [politically] far left or far right, people care more about privacy. In the middle, people care less and just want to have a good experience.”
“If you go [politically] far left or far right, people care more about privacy. In the middle, people care less and just want to have a good experience.”
As for public distrust of Zuckerberg, Sag says his thorny reputation may not sit well with the public, but it’s considered part of Meta’s strength in a niche space like XR.
“Meta would not be where it is today if it weren’t for Mark Zuckerberg … Even if people disagree with him, ultimately what he wants is what gets done,” Sag says. “I think his fear of losing the AI race is what sparked the whole Superintelligence Lab, and now they’re back in the competition. He has blind spots, but he’s able to correct much more quickly than any other CEO founder … every time people have counted him out or questioned his leadership, he’s been able to claw the company back.”
That unilateral doggedness is why Meta seems hell-bent on barreling forward with AI glasses, privacy qualms be damned. A few months ago, it released Meta Glasses, a newer and cheaper version of the Ray-Ban glasses sans Ray-Ban branding. At a launch event, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth told the press that Meta was contemplating audio-only glasses without cameras. It will likely launch even more new styles, collaborations, and potentially new hardware and privacy protections at Meta Connect 2026 this week.
“Meta missed mobile, they missed VR when it first came out. The metaverse didn’t pan out the way they thought it would. That’s one of the reasons why we’re seeing them so determined and willing to spend to make AI glasses happen,” says Ubrani.
It’s unclear whether Meta can maintain its lead in the XR space. AI wearables are only just beginning to heat up, with players big and small eager to throw their hat in the ring across multiple form factors ranging from pendants to smartwatches. Meta only has glasses — and it’s tying the glasses’ success to the overall success of the company’s AI bets. And on that side of the business, things are looking like a hot mess.