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Last year, Mark Zuckerberg's 'metaverse' business lost more over $10 billion, and the losses keep growing.

• For the first time, Meta revealed financials for its "metaverse" business.
• Reality Labs has recorded tremendous, ever-increasing losses, including more than $10 billion in just 2021.
• The losses suggest that Facebook is investing a lot of money to go to the next level of growth.

It is not cheap to construct the metaverse.

In its fourth-quarter 2021 earnings report, Meta, Facebook's parent corporation, released for the first time the financials of its Reality Labs business.

That's the division of Facebook tasked with realising CEO Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse vision. Hardware revenue, such as the company's Meta Quest virtual reality headset, is also included.

Thus, how's Zuckerberg's massive metaverse bet working out so far?

Reality Labs, as expected, disclosed significant and rising losses - more than $10 billion in just 2021.

Take a look at Meta's Reality Labs' net losses for the years 2019 through 2021:

• 2019: $4.5 billion in net loss on $501 million in revenue
• 2020: $6.62 billion in net loss on $1.14 billion in revenue
• 2021: $10.19 billion in net loss on $2.27 billion in revenue

The projected losses for 2021 are in keeping with what Zuckerberg announced last year about the amount of money he planned to put into Reality Labs. And the losses are only expected to increase this year. On the company's results call on Wednesday, Meta's CFO stated that he expected operating losses to "rise considerably" in 2022.

Meta's overall profitability for the year was also hampered by the losses. Without Reality Labs, the business would have made more than $56 billion in profit for the entire year.

Let's put this in perspective: Reality Labs lost $3.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2017. During the same period, Alphabet's Other Bets sector, which includes all those crazy ideas like self-driving cars and health-care technologies, lost almost half of that, or $1.45 billion.

The question now is, what is Meta spending all of that cash on? When will the spending binge come to an end? Employee costs, research and development, and costs of things sold, according to the company's CFO, accounted for $4.2 billion of the losses.

The financials of Reality Labs also reflect Meta's advantage in creating the metaverse. Unlike smaller metaverse competitors like Roblox or Epic Games, it practically has unlimited funds to spend on these projects.

Plus, it's possible that Meta will have a decade or more to carry it off before investors lose patience. Executives have already stated that fully realising their ambition might take up to 15 years. Meta has more than enough time to pivot to a new strategy as it seeks fresh growth opportunities.

On Wednesday, though, even Meta's main business disappointed. Meta's stock dropped more than 20% in late trading after the company missed profit projections, owing in part to Reality Labs' losses.