At the end of last year there was a lot of attention on Meta and the bet their CEO Mark Zuckerberg had seemingly made on being all in on the metaverse. Rebranding Facebook in 2021 to create this new offering of Meta signalled to many his intent to win in this space and invest everything in it, spending $13.7 billion in 2022 alone on the effort.

But as tech funding fell away and grey clouds grew over the economy, investors put pressure on Meta to invest less in this nascent space, reduce headcount and go back to what they had done so well for the decade previously, which is getting us to be social online while they advertise to us.

At the same time, in another part of Silicon Valley the controversial entrepreneur Elon Musk was buying and blowing up Twitter. Having overpaid, he reduced costs, opened up access to the previously banned and picked fights with many, including his own advertisers.