“I think Mark Zuckerberg is telling us he doesn’t think he has a core business,” Needham Senior Analyst Laura Martin told Yahoo Finance.

“He is moving to Reels because it competes with TikTok,” Martin added. “He is moving to the metaverse, and he’s changed the name of this company, which tells me he doesn’t think his core business that he built 15 years ago is actually a business anymore.”

While Facebook’s metaverse struggles with persistent bugs, a lack of users, and a general disinterest among its own employees, the Chinese-owned app TikTok is now the favorite social media platform among Generation Z, according to research conducted by Piper Sandler.

“The macro environment continues to deteriorate,” Martin said. “We think many ad-driven companies will miss their fourth-quarter earnings. And in Meta’s case, not only is just the macro environment deteriorating, but they’re losing a lot of user time to TikTok. And that continues to happen.”