Zuckerberg defended his position in an investor call.

Earlier in 2022, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg released the first picture of his avatar in his “metaverse” platform, Horizon Worlds, posing emotionlessly in front of a scaled-down Eiffel Tower. At the time, the avatar was the subject of memes and jokes due to its mildly uncanny appearance, on top of the already frequent memeing on the metaverse proper. This week, Zuckerberg spoke to Meta investors in a conference call, where he spoke about the memes born from the image.

“I know that sometimes when we ship a product, there’s a meme where people say, “Hey, you’re spending all this money, and you’ve produced this thing,” and it’s — I think that that’s not really the right way to think about it,” Zuckerberg said in the call, originally reported by TechCrunch.

“I think there’s a number of different products and platforms that we’re building, where we think we’re doing leading work that will become… launching consumer products and then eventually mature products at different cadences, different periods of time over the next five to 10 years,” he added.

The memes that relentlessly mocked Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar seem to have struck a nerve with the CEO https://t.co/VFOOUvpuV6

— Tech Insider (@TechInsider) October 27, 2022

Zuckerberg added that he’s confident in the progress of his developers, and is still certain that virtual reality and augmented reality technologies are the wave of the future. “Obviously it has a long way to go before it’s going to be what we aspire for it to be,” Zuckerberg said about Horizon Worlds. “We think we’re doing some leading work there, but obviously we need to get that into the product and continue innovating on that.”