No, earnings have been going down because Apple fucked Meta with Apple's policy change on asking for consent to be tracked. Meta has even stated as much in various earnings calls since this happened.

This has severely hurt Meta's ad revenue, i.e., earnings.

The metaverse stuff is a bad bet, you are correct, but is not likely impacting earnings in any significant way.

Revenue has slowed from the Apple change, but the drop in Q3 profits can almost entirely be pinned on RL as staff and other investments has accelerated.

> company’s rising costs and expenses, which jumped 19% year over year to $22.1 billion during the quarter.

> Meta’s Reality Labs unit, which is responsible for developing the virtual reality and related augmented reality technology that underpins the yet-to-be built metaverse, has lost $9.4 billion so far in 2022.

The effects from the Apple changes are mostly in the rear view mirror at this point. You could attributed a 4% revenue hit to them, but those can also be attributed to a general slowing economy.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/26/meta-plans-to-lose-even-more...

Earnings down 4% in bad macro conditions for advertising and compared to a pandemic when people spent more time on the internet. I don't think facebook revenue is going anywhere soon, a decade from now though who knows.

Their income and operating margin has almost halved, compared to 2021. Their free cash flow is 1/50th of the previous few quarters. Those are truly horrible results.

FB was a money printing machine, but they trashed it.

Apple trashed it, not FB itself.

FB started sinking money into the Metaverse long before that.

Not at the same scale. It's been accelerating and continues to accelerate. From another announcement today:

> "We continue to anticipate that Reality Labs operating losses in 2023 will grow significantly year-over-year,"

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/meta-lowers-expense-foreca...

Everyone wants to dance on Meta's grave, but it's way too soon. Yes, the Apple change gave them a top line haircut, but if the RL spend is excluded, they are making a ton of money. I'd also argue that the real headwinds are the general economy and TikTok.

>the real headwinds are the general economy and TikTok

Right, and not Apple's actions.

They are still making insane profits.

High revenue but the stock is down 74% this year for a reason.

Because it's run by an unaccountable megalomaniac who has signalled that he doesn't give a shit about his investors, not because of any fundamentals.

Bad governance is fundamental!

I don't think Mark saying "we're going to focus on the metaverse instead of making money for a few years" is a meltdown. They're still making money, their earnings are still sky high, they're just spending more than they need to.