Three years ago, Mark Zuckerberg said the word “metaverse” eight times on Meta’s third-quarter earnings call. This time around, he didn’t say it once.
On Meta’s earnings call on Wednesday, analysts asked CEO Mark Zuckerberg and CFO Susan Li about the state of the business. The executives spoke extensively about cap-ex, compute, and advertising tech.
The metaverse — a peak priority a few years ago — was the most glaring omission. Horizon, Meta’s virtual reality platform, also went unsaid.
Meta isn’t giving up on its metaverse push. In a recent memo viewed by Business Insider, CTO Andrew Bosworth told employees about a shake-up in the division. “The priority of the metaverse work remains unchanged, and it continues to be a companywide priority,” he wrote.
Bosworth had previously told Meta staff that this year would be the “most critical” to prove the metaverse is either a visionary feat or a “legendary misadventure,” according to an earlier memo viewed by Business Insider.
The word of the call was “compute,” which Zuckerberg said 14 times, and Li said 8 times. Other words related to Meta’s AI cap-ex, like “infrastructure” and “capacity,” bubbled up at 12 references each.
Meta is investing heavily in its compute power and AI infrastructure. The company raised its 2025 capex spending guidance, and Li said it would spend even more in 2026.
Investors seem to be growing skeptical, as Meta shares plunged by double digits on Thursday.
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Zuckerberg also repeated the word “novel” seven times, referencing the pursuit of novel work and AI capabilities. As Meta builds (and trims) its superintelligence lab, the company hopes to build a frontier model with truly original use cases.
“We expect to build novel models and novel products, and I’m excited to share more when we have it,” Zuckerberg said.
Among its social networks, Facebook got the most shoutouts at 13. Instagram and Threads were mentioned 11 and 10 times, respectively. WhatsApp trailed behind at 6 mentions.
Consumer hardware was a major focus of the call. Participants said “glasses” six times and “Quest” — Meta’s virtual reality headset — nine times.
Politics went almost entirely unmentioned on the call. Meta paid a $15.9 billion tax charge related to the implementation of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which weighed on it earnings, though the company said it expected to see a lower tax rate in future years.
The words “president” and “Trump” were not mentioned. Previous earnings calls mentioned “macroeconomic uncertainty” without explicitly citing tariffs. The third-quarter call did not mention such uncertainties.
As for its competitors, neither Zuckerberg nor Li on the call name-checked OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or xAI. One analyst did mention OpenAI’s viral Sora video app, though.
