Meta's Reality Labs posted a $4.2 billion operating loss in Q1 2025. According to CNBC, cumulative losses since 2020 now exceed $60 billion. From the report: Meta's Reality Labs unit is responsible for the company's Quest-branded virtual reality headsets and Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. It's the key...
So that’s like $12B/year. At $200k/employee/year that would be 60,000 people!
How many people do they have working on VR, or is this creative accounting to bury operating expenses as capital investments?
Compensation for engineers in the Bay area will average much higher than $200k, and that’s not counting benefits (medical, etc.). So cost to the company will be way higher than 200k/employee.
For a project that has hardware, there will be large expenses associated with that — custom silicon has huge setup costs, for example.
It’d be much more reliable if we can see the real data that shows how much these employees cost the company.
Employees like this usually cost the company at least double their salary in support and benefits, so you’re probably talking about half that at most.
Along with that, there is probably a lot of R&D expenses as well.
Finally, Meta seems to be subsidizing the consumer hardware, so that’s probably hurting the bottom line even more.