Meta’s VP of XR, Mark Rabkin, is departing the company after leading its XR efforts for more than four years. Rabkin cites family health issues as the primary driver for his departure.

Today Mark Rabkin announced his plan to leave the company in March. In his public announcement he said, “devs and fans [of XR]—I will leave you in good hands. More to come.” Which likely means we’ll soon learn who will take over the role in his place.

As Meta’s VP of XR for the last four years, Rabkin oversaw the launch of Quest 3, Quest 3S, and the latest platform developments, like Quest’s software rebranding to Horizon OS, the assimilation of App Lab into the Horizon OS store, and a significant push toward mixed reality and spatial computing on the company’s headsets.

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Though Rabkin was VP of XR for some four years, he says he’s been at Meta for 18 in total, where he had started in 2007 as a “rowdy, slightly cocky, fresh-faced backend infrastructure C++ engineer in my twenties.”

According to his LinkedIn, Rabkin worked his way up to VP positions over the following decade. He joined the XR side of the company in 2019, first as the VP of XR Experiences before eventually becoming the VP of XR overall.

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Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Christian Schildwaechter

    In case this isn't clear, there are no presidents of anything at Meta, only vice presidents. So this is the head of Meta XR leaving, only he isn't called head, because head at Meta is mostly a manager for a specific product, like Head of Instagram or Head of Messenger. Above the VPs are the CxO, like Andrew Bosworth as CTO covering all of Meta's technology, or Susan Li as CFO covering finances for all branches and departments. Meta's management isn't a (strict) hierarchy though, they call it a matrix.

    Above all of them hovers CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who through his special founder shares with 10x the voting power controls 60% of the total vote, so he stands even above Meta's collective shareholders and can decide everything by himself. Which is how he managed to "convince" share holders (as in telling them without asking for or requiring approval) that spending so far almost USD 70bn and much more in the future at MRL is a good idea and therefore what Meta will do. Being able to simply reject requests for questions or propositions at share holder meetings is of course very convenient, since you don't even have to bother with discussing something that you know you will later downvote into oblivion anyway.