The implication in my comment is that they might indeed have not paid him anything. And Fridman on principle may not have accepted payment even if offered. But who knows what type of deals go down behind the curtain in the podcasting world, it’s not unheard of to come across interviews that look like paid promotion where the podcaster doesn’t explicitly state it as such.

But my point was more really that even if they paid him 10 million, the PR would have been worth it.

  >That demo was going to happen one day or another as the tech progresses

Yes, all amazing technology is going to happen eventually — no one really cares about that. They care about seeing it happen in the present, right in front of their eyes. The metaverse was mocked profusely in 2023, and we have gone through multiple cycles of “This is going to be the year of VR” in past decades. Tech stocks have been flat the last couple of months and Meta is a public company. No one on the outside would have batted an eye if they quietly shut this whole thing down after being so relentlessly mocked for the past year. So saying Zuckerberg doing this demo was inevitable after the fact is a bit flippant I think.

And if facebook did a demo with a bunch of celebrities and put it on their website I’m not sure it would have the same effect as this long interview with Fridman. It wouldn’t have the same effect on me that’s for sure. And I’m pretty sure they would have paid those celebrities.

Anybody who has tried VR knows that the critics have been way off and it's not about if, but about when someone is convinced that VR is amazing