Jim Breyer, one of Facebook’s earliest investors, believes that Meta isn’t cutting costs fast enough amid the company slated to report its third consecutive quarterly revenue decline.
“My view is over the next 24 months there will be a big rebound,” said the founder of Breyer Capital on Thursday during an interview with CNBC. “But they’re gonna be under a lot of pressure for the next 12 months, and they’re not cutting costs fast enough, in my humble opinion.”
“The Metaverse is years away,” Breyer added, regarding the company’s 2021 name change and subsequent multibillion-dollar investment into virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes that the social media giant needs to spend billions of dollars on VR and AR to help develop what could be the next frontier for personal computing, despite many investors urging the company to refocus back on its core online advertising business.
Breyer appears to be optimistic that VR will experience a rebound this year, even though overall VR headset sales shrank last year.
“Virtual reality is going to be a very big deal this Christmas holiday,” Breyer said. “It’ll be Apple, it’ll be Google, it’ll be Sony as well as Oculus, but watch for a big holiday in the world of virtual reality.”
Regarding Chinese tech giant ByteDance and its Facebook-rival social video service TikTok, Breyer said that he’s “very interested long term in TikTok” and was keen on ByteDance’s heavy investment into artificial intelligence.
Still, Breyer seemed concerned about whether TikTok could potentially be banned in the U.S., as numerous state governments and universities have banned use of the app over concerns about user data potentially being accessed by the Chinese government.
“My hometown of Austin, Texas. At the University of Texas, they just banned Tiktok from all devices,” Breyer said referring to a December decision by university officials. “But for sure, the data questions and where the data resides is not going away.”