Mark Zuckerberg firmly believes wearables are the future. He’s so obsessed with them, in fact, he wears his Meta glasses pretty much everywhere.
“I’ve taken business calls on a jet ski,” he told Complex in an interview published earlier this week. “The other person could not tell that I was on it.”
The Meta CEO credited the microphone placement in the nose pad of Meta’s glasses for the crystal-clear audio. He also claimed the audio clarity is so good “you could literally be in a wind tunnel and it would sound completely clear to the person on the other side.”
This makes working from anywhere that much easier: “You don’t necessarily want to tell the other person that you’re on a jet ski,” Zuckerberg added.
The world’s seventh-richest man is the primary evangelist for smart glasses. Meta sells a full lineup of AI-enabled eyewear built with Ray-Ban and Oakley parent EssilorLuxottica, ranging from the Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) at $379 to the $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, the company’s first consumer-ready glasses with a built-in display. Zuckerberg unveiled the Ray-Ban Display glasses at Meta’s Connect conference in September.
The Display model comes bundled with a Neural Band, a wristband that reads electrical signals in the forearm to let wearers navigate the heads-up display with subtle finger gestures. These glasses also have a display on the right side that can show texts, alerts, apps, photos, and even give live translations.
Why Zuckerberg is so sure about glasses
Zuckerberg’s confidence in the wearables market stems from a simple bet: that nearly 2 billion people who already wear glasses for vision correction represent a ready-made market, he said. Zuckerberg also likens it to the shift from flip phones to smartphones.
“It felt pretty clear that in five years or whatever, all of the flip phones were going to be smartphones, and that’s basically how I feel about glasses today,” he said.
He also argues glasses allow people to stay “present with the people around you” in a way phones don’t, while giving an AI assistant the ability to “see what you see, hear what you hear, talk to you throughout the day.”
Zuckerberg said Meta has been working on the underlying technology since 2014, starting with virtual and augmented reality, and that the company is already planning its 2028 glasses lineup. The smart glasses effort is also part of what he calls building “personal super intelligence.” It’s a vision he contrasts with that of rival AI labs, arguing that a future with “one big AI” everyone uses would be “a bad future, no matter how good the AI is.”
Zuckerberg’s optimism has been consistent, having told analysts last year people without AI glasses could one day be at a “pretty significant cognitive disadvantage.” On Meta’s January earnings call, he said sales of the glasses tripled within the last year and called them “some of the fastest growing consumer electronics in history.”
But Zuckerberg’s obsession with smart glasses isn’t cheap. Meta’s Reality Labs division, which houses the glasses business, posted a $19.2 billion loss in 2025, and the company expects 2026 capital expenditures to hit as much as $145 billion.
“The formula for our company has always been to build experiences that can get to billions of people and focus on monetizing them once you get to scale,” Zuckerberg argued earlier this year.
The glasses have occasionally created awkward moments for Meta’s founder—including in February, when a judge threatened to hold members of Zuckerberg’s entourage in contempt of court for wearing the recording-capable glasses into a no-recording courtroom. But if the jet ski story is any indication, Zuckerberg isn’t bothered by what other people think of his product.
