Elon Musk wants to conquer space, but he is apparently not very interested in exploring new virtual territories in the metaverse. Is the billionaire necessarily right to doubt the future of what is massively presented as the innovation of the moment?
Elon Musk and the Metaverse: keeping your feet on the ground
For Elon Musk, the terms web3 and metavers are just “a kind of buzzwordy”. The founder of Tesla and SpaceX criticizes virtual reality, at least as it is currently understood. In particular, he is not convinced by the eventual success of “a damn screen in your face all day”.
A virtual reality headset would be, to hear him, doomed to failure: these VR headsets give you motion sickness when you play video games with them, and “it’s going to ruin your eyesight, isn’t it?” with a screen literally stuck in front of your eyes.
Elon Musk also indicated his skepticism about a future where people would leave the physical world, to live in a virtual one.
Are these attacks of the billionaire against the metaverse well-founded? Musk is right when he says that the word metavers has become the buzzword of the moment, especially after the rebranding of Facebook as Meta. There’s nothing like a little metaverse sauce to season a project that still exists only on paper, to make it more attractive – or not – to investors and target customers. But what about his other arguments against metavers?
VR headsets, the enemy to kill: a good marketing move?
The billionaire attacks virtual reality headsets, without necessarily taking into account that access to a metaverse is not necessarily conditioned by the use of this type of equipment. These headsets make the experience more immersive, but they do not condition the existence and the proper functioning of a virtual world – did famous video games necessarily need a VR headset to be successful?
These criticisms against virtual reality headsets seem mostly to be a marketing stunt by the billionaire to promote the future products of his neurotechnology startup Neuralink, which develops brain implants on humans to restore and improve physical abilities:
“In the long run, a sophisticated Neuralink could bring you fully into virtual reality. I think we’re a long way from disappearing into the metaverse, it just seems to be a buzzwordy kind of thing.”
The billionaire emphasizes finally, that a future where we would live in a virtual world to leave the physical world is unthinkable. This vision is rather caricatured. It would imply that the success of metavers necessarily implies that people who dive into them, stay there almost all day – aren’t social networks successful even though their users spend time there without totally disconnecting from the real world?
Will Elon Musk eventually change his mind about the metaverse? After all, we had similar scenarios with bitcoin (BTC).
