The internet hated Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘$10 billion’ metaverse selfie, so he made another one

 Last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attracted a flurry of attention to his metaverse platform, for all the wrong reasons.

Mark Zuckerberg

 

 The trouble began when, to celebrate the launch of Meta’s Horizon Worlds in France and Spain, Zuckerberg posted a selfie of his metaverse avatar standing in front of digital renderings of the Eiffel Tower and La Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona. 

The internet was quick to make fun of the grainy selfie, pointing out that it resembled decades-old video games as well as the virtual world game called Second Life—which arguably became the first popular “metaverse” back in 2003. Zuckerberg’s selfie was so widely circulated on social media it even got its own entry on the website knowyourmeme.com which posts the stories behind viral memes.

This weekend, Zuckerberg responded to his critics with a new and improved selfie of his avatar that he posted on Facebook and Instagram. In the post, the billionaire admitted that his first selfie was “pretty basic,” but said that it was taken “very quickly to celebrate a launch.”

Instead of a backdrop of illogically proximate monuments, his new “selfie” was taken in front of a gray background. Albeit the second iteration looked more like him and lacked the seemingly dead eyes of his previous selfie.