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The billionaire battle for the metaverse
亿万富翁的元宇宙之争
You have to hand it to Mark Zuckerberg. When the founder of Facebook announced in October that he was changing the name of the social-media network’s parent company to Meta Platforms in order to help create an alternative digital reality known as the metaverse, he was mercilessly mocked. To some, he was generating a smokescreen to distract attention from a political furore. To others, he was merely the latest middle-aged tech billionaire to chase a childhood fantasy, much as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Tesla’s Elon Musk were doing with space rockets.
你不得不佩服马克·扎克伯格。今年10月，这位社交媒体网站Facebook的创始人宣布，他将把这家社交媒体网站的母公司更名为Meta Platforms，以帮助创造一个被称为“元空间”的替代数字现实时，他遭到了无情的嘲讽。在一些人看来，他在制造烟幕，以分散人们对政治风波的注意力。在其他人看来，他不过是最新一位追逐童年幻想的中年科技亿万富翁，就像亚马逊的杰夫·贝佐斯和特斯拉的埃隆·马斯克在太空火箭方面所做的那样。
And yet his timing was impeccable. Since October searches on Google for “metaverse” have soared. Wall Street is fanning the hype. According to Bernstein, a broker, the term cropped up 449 times in third-quarter earnings calls, up from 100 in the second quarter. It says markets with potential annual revenue of at least $2trn could be disrupted by the metaverse. Jefferies, a bank, says that though the phenomenon may be more than a decade away, it has the potential to disrupt “almost everything in human life”.
然而，他的时机是无可挑剔的。自10月以来，“metaverse”在谷歌上的搜索量飙升。华尔街正在煽风点火。据经纪公司伯恩斯坦的数据，这个词在第三季度的财报电话会议中出现了449次，比第二季度的100次要多得多。报告称，潜在年收入至少为2万亿美元的市场可能会被元宇宙被打乱。杰富瑞银行表示，尽管呈现这一现象可能还需要十多年的时间，但它有可能颠覆 "人类生活中的几乎所有事物"。
Other tech giants like Microsoft have set out plans to head for the metaverse. But it is big firms still under the control of their founders that may become the most ardent evangelists. Mr Zucker berg, with a net worth close to $125bn and almost total control of a company valued at $908bn, is the most prominent.
微软等其他科技巨头已经制定了进军元世界的计划。但那些仍在创始人控制下的大公司才有可能成为最热心的“传道者”。扎克伯格的净资产接近1250亿美元，几乎完全控制了一家价值9080亿美元的公司，他是最突出的。
