With nearly 3 billion Facebook users, 2 billion WhatsApp users, and 1.5 billion Instagram users, 38-year-old Mark Zuckerberg presides over the world’s largest social media empire by far. In October 2021, however, his company underwent a major rebrand. Changing its name from Facebook to Meta, the nearly $400 billion company officially threw its weight behind the “metaverse,” a concept for an immersive online experience letting users work, game, and socialize in virtual reality (VR), as opposed to navigating between separate websites as mediated by computers or smartphones.1 In just one year, the company intended to spend $10 billion on Reality Labs, its metaverse division that grew out of its 2014 acquisition of VR tech developer Oculus.2