I'd rather they pay the money out to their shareholders as dividends.

Remember ‘adpocalypse’? Metas cash cows all rely on third party devices and hardware they don’t control. Apple and Google dictate how much info they get on critical fronts, and can cut Meta out at any point. VR was an attempt to create a sustained platform advantage where Meta was in control. “AI” is an area where Metas mining of its own data could plausibly create products and services that would be uniquely competitive against MS/Google/Amazon and OpenAI/Anthropic. Regardless of broader market success, those AI capabilities should avoid a scenario where Metas operations and ad-wizardry have to rely on a third party AI giant who is simultaneously a product competitor, dooming them to irrelevancy.

The accusation is the Zuck is flighty and arbitrary. But his business is arguably a dead-man-walking without strategic realignment. On a 15 year timeline Meta is vulnerable from all sides and swimming upstream against social platform decay. These Hail Mary efforts seem reactive to their vulnerabilities, with an eye to securing long term existence.