Mark Zuckerberg wants to get a billion people spending hundreds of dollars each in his metaverse

Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to build a “creator economy” that will attract a billion people by the end of the decade. His company’s metaverse will enable users to “express themselves” by buying digital goods and content.

Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook), spoke to CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Wednesday. He spoke of his plans to build out a virtual reality world, known as a metaverse, so that customers could come and buy virtual goods and content in order to “express themselves”.

“We hope to basically get to around a billion people in the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars of commerce, each buying digital goods, digital content, different things to express themselves, so whether that’s clothing for their avatar or different digital goods for their virtual home or things to decorate their virtual conference room,”

At a time when economies around the world are potentially going into recession, inflation is soaring, and prices of food and energy are going through the roof, Zuckerberg is making a rather brave statement.

Granted that world economies would hope to be in a better place in 10 years time, but for the next year or so things do not appear to be very positive for the average global consumer, so talk of spending hundreds of dollars on things that only exist virtually perhaps does not come across so well.

However, it must be said that the best entrepreneurs are thinking ahead, and they are getting down to working hard in the midst of difficult times. Zuckerberg is obviously totally sold on his idea of exploiting the future of metaverses. 

“I think there’s going to be a massive economy around this. It's going to create a lot of opportunity for creators. That's why you hear my talks about the creator economy so much. I'm just really excited about a world where you're going to have millions of more people who can do creative work that just makes them happy at their job instead of things that they might be doing today because they feel like they need to in order to make money.”

Zuckerberg certainly has the know-how with which to build out a company from scratch, as his experience with turning Facebook into a social network giant will testify.

“You know, our playbook over time has been build services, try to serve as many people as possible — you know, get our services to a billion, two billion, three billion people, and then we basically scale the monetization after that,”

You cannot doubt Zuckerberg’s conviction for his company’s new direction. However, it remains to be seen just how many of his potential customers will have forgotten what Facebook did with their data. Much trust is going to have to be won back, therefore Meta needs to embrace transparency, security, and far more willingness to really put its customers first.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.