Mark Zuckerberg should quit. He should step down from his position as CEO of Meta and let someone else manage Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. He should then use his vast wealth and venture-capital connections to launch a startup that can build out his vision of the metaverse.

I think this is the only way Zuckerberg can save his empire from himself. Not to mention it would be in the best interest of society.

On Tuesday, we got yet another clear sign that Zuckerberg needs to move on. Meta held a conference called Meta Connect to, theoretically, show off the cool things Meta’s developers have been able to make in the metaverse. These demos are supposed to convince people that the metaverse is a place they want to go — and convince investors that Zuckerberg’s massive investment in the new tech is worth it.

So what did the company announce to convince us — the tired, jaded people of the internet — that the $1,500 headset that connects us to Zuckerberg’s metaverse is worth it? LEGS! Avatars with legs! You get legs! And you get legs! Yes, the big reveal was that avatars in the company’s metaverse platform will now have legs, having previously been limited to floating torsos. Zuckerberg was so excited about legs that he jumped for joy as he talked about them. Now his avatar can do the same, I suppose.

If only the rest of the world shared Zuckerberg’s excitement. Last year Meta spent $10 billion developing the metaverse, but it has little to show for it: It said in February that only 300,000 users were logging on to its Horizon Worlds platform monthly, a paltry amount compared with Facebook’s 2.9 billion. Wall Street is clearly watching this whole project with one eyebrow raised — Meta’s stock is down by about 60% year to date.

Zuckerberg already has two very profitable platforms — Facebook and Instagram — but their popularity is declining. At the end of last year, for the first time, Facebook’s user base shrank. Both platforms have been losing younger eyeballs to TikTok and older eyeballs to mental-health awareness. Fixing this problem requires attention, innovation, and hard work that it looks like Zuckerberg has little interest in. So he should leave that job to someone more engaged and competent, and take his metaverse show to the startup world.

Faceflop

Meta is facing the roughest business headwinds of its life right now. The economy is likely headed into the first global recession since Facebook went public in 2012. Higher interest rates and a strong dollar are crushing tech companies’ bottom lines. Apple’s privacy measures have limited the ability of Facebook and Instagram to gather lucrative information about users — a change Meta estimated would cost it $10 billion in advertising revenue this year. And Americans generally find the company’s business model creepy. This has thrown Meta’s business into panic mode: The company is said to be prepping for “quiet layoffs” and rescinding some internship offers.

Beyond the current economic conditions, Meta faces existential threats to its core platforms. In just a decade, everything we thought we knew about social media has turned on its head. Connecting the world — or just catching up with your high-school classmates — no longer seems like a fun idea. Meta’s platforms have helped facilitate all kinds of corrosive behavior: insurrections, genocide, eating disorders. Facebook burned society so badly that it gave algorithms in general a bad name. All this negativity is starting to turn people off. In February, Facebook reported its first decline in the number of active worldwide users, and while that number has rebounded, there are real worries that attrition on its main apps could pick up. Zuckerberg said Facebook would “move fast and break things,” and it has — including itself.

All these problems require intense focus — on improving the company’s flagship products, on repairing its public image, on showing investors that the company’s business can survive the coming economic chaos. But Zuckerberg’s focus is not on the present. Instead he is absorbed in what he sees as Meta’s future. A visionary leader is great during times of intense growth, but Meta needs a leader who can take a clear-eyed look at the company — someone who isn’t saddled with the emotional baggage of being a founder. If Bill Gates can have the stones to step away from Microsoft, or Larry Page and Sergey Brin can realize the time is right to hand Google to someone else, Zuckerberg should be able to call it quits too.

A virtual land grab

Zuckerberg has always focused on total “domination” of whatever field he’s in; that’s why he is totally captivated with controlling the metaverse — every detail of it. A New York Times article suggests that after someone made fun of his old doll-like metaverse avatar, Zuckerberg became so obsessed with creating a new one that a graphic artist was forced to draw 40 versions of his face over a month until one was finally approved. Internally, employees told the Times, Meta workers refer to metaverse projects as MMH, or “Make Mark Happy,” projects. This kind of micromanagement may serve a founder operating a small startup from his dorm room, but it will not serve a CEO operating a Fortune 500 company with a host of other problems.

If Zuckerberg wants to micromanage his face off (on?), a startup is the place for him to do it. He could spin off the Horizon part of Facebook and then seek out venture-capital money from all his billionaire friends. (I mean, the WeWork guy just got a fresh $375 million, how hard could it be?) Plenty of other big tech founders — Page and Brin, along with Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Uber’s Travis Kalanick — have gone on to start passion projects outside the walls of their original companies. And by taking the metaverse parts of the company private, Zuckerberg could build his new world in stealth mode, where he won’t have to deal with millions of people obsessing over every little hiccup and clowning him for it.

A startup would also give Zuckerberg more freedom to build up his vision by acquiring other companies. As it stands, the Federal Trade Commission is watching Meta like a hawk. It’s no secret that the agency’s new, more muscular regulators think that the company is too big and that the approvals of Facebook’s Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions were mistakes. In fact, the FTC is already suing Meta over its attempt to acquire a virtual-reality fitness company — a suit Meta has said is “based on ideology, not evidence.” If Zuckerberg wants to go on a buying spree to help scale up his metaverse ambitions, he has to do it outside the strictures of his current company.

Latent in all of Zuckerberg’s talk of the metaverse is the possibility that he believes Facebook and Instagram cannot be saved — that he’s left them for dead like an old hotmail.com email address, riddled with spam and clogged with messages so old they aren’t even worth reading anymore. Perhaps he thinks the platforms are too unwieldy to manage without the tailwinds of popularity at their back. Perhaps Zuckerberg doesn’t want to be on Facebook and Instagram anymore because the work that needs to be done to save the platforms is not the work he likes to do. That’s fine. 

But if that’s the case, he should quit.

Linette Lopez is a senior correspondent at Insider.