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Mark Zuckerberg sounded nervous.
The Meta CEO had just announced that his company would slash thousands of jobs last month, on top of 11,000 layoffs in November.
During an hour-long town hall meeting from the company’s Menlo Park headquarters in California, the decimated workforce peppered Zuckerberg with questions — including why they should have confidence in his leadership.
“That’s a completely fair question,” Zuckerberg responded without his usual bluster, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The Washington Post.
It was a sobering admission for the CEO, who popularized the phrase “move fast and break things” to describe how he made a scrappy start-up into a towering $116 billion symbol of Silicon Valley success. Zuckerberg has shepherded Meta through years of public turbulence, offering employees confident defiance and the security that, despite some missteps, their CEO always bet on the correct future.
Zuckerberg praises Meta executives a day after laying off 4,000 workers
But now, roiled by economic tumult, waves of layoffs that will slash some 21,000 workers and a costly investment in the virtual reality “metaverse” that shows no immediate signs of paying off, many inside Meta say Zuckerberg has lost his vision — and the trust of his workforce. Instead, he is steering the company into an unprecedented morale crisis, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
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“It’s like they went from ‘move fast and break things’ to ‘slow down, break things,’ then ‘maybe fix it later on a case-by-case’” basis, one of the employees said.
Meta’s core product, Facebook, is battling TikTok for users and marketers. Economic forces have cut into its advertising business. The company lags on generative artificial intelligence, which is quickly revolutionizing the tech industry.
Last week, Meta’s stock rose 13 percent on news that quarterly revenue had ticked up for the first time in nearly a year. But insiders say the layoffs — along with pledges from Zuckerberg for further cost-cutting — have shattered internal resolve.
Even in the highest ranks of Meta’s leadership, some blame Zuckerberg for the company’s malaise. For example, Meta hired 41,000 people during the pandemic, in a frenzy to invest in labor while money was pouring in. During a company meeting this month, Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth said Zuckerberg made some hires over the “objections” of senior executives — and sometimes rebuffed their advice in order to fire people, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private company matters.
Zuckerberg has characterized the cost-cutting as painful but necessary, part of a “year of efficiency” aimed at preparing the company for slower revenue growth triggered by rising interest rates and geopolitical instability. He’s part of a cohort of tech executives who have responded to the shifting market by cutting staff.
Zuckerberg was personally involved in the cuts, despite keeping a reduced work schedule because of the birth of his third child. He has deputized a cadre of top executives along with people in human resources, legal and finance departments to help redraw the organizational charts and find ways to make the company more efficient.
In a statement, Meta spokesman Dave Arnold said the conditions that led to the layoffs are “well known and reverberating throughout the industry.”
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“Mark has been transparent about how we’re becoming more efficient to make us a better technology company and improve our financial performance,” Arnold said.
Facebook thought pandemic online shopping would last forever. It didn’t.
Still, morale is low. It was already harder for the company to attract and retain the best talent thanks to an array of scandals, including Facebook’s role in spreading misinformation in the 2016 election. In an internal employee survey in October, before layoffs, just 31 percent of respondents said they were confident leaders were taking the company in the right direction — an 11-point drop from May 2022, according to one of the people.
Zuckerberg promised last week that the company will return to stability once the restructuring is over. But as employees persevere through seven months of continuous job cuts, it’s unclear if the CEO will be able to regain their confidence.
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“What was special about Meta was the trust. We drank the Kool-Aid and really felt like it was our company [and] even willingly defended it when everyone said we were evil incarnate,” one current employee said. “But that’s been shattered, so it feels like a betrayal.”
Kingdom builders
For years, Meta hired plentifully, luring workers with generous benefits and some of the highest salaries in tech. Company culture encouraged recruiting. Every year, Zuckerberg consults with executives to set up hiring goals based on business priorities — a process that was sometimes called “Napkin,” according to one of the people.
Ambitious managers could move up the ladder by proposing projects requiring them to spin up a new team or claim a departing manager’s direct reports. These climbers were privately called “empire builders” or “kingdom builders” by their colleagues, according to three of the people.
The age of the Silicon Valley ‘moonshot’ is over
And Meta could afford to build up legions of “kingdoms.” Throughout 2020 and 2021, Meta benefited from an influx of brands using Facebook and Instagram to reach customers, as the coronavirus pandemic forced shoppers online. By early 2021, the company said e-commerce had become its largest advertising sector. “Commerce has been growing on our services for a while,” Zuckerberg told investors in April 2021. But the pandemic made it “a lot more important.”
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Meta quickly retooled to take advantage of the demand. For years, the company grew its employee ranks by double-digit percentage points; the trend accelerated during the pandemic. Head count nearly doubled between 2019 and 2022, according to regulatory filings. It launched Facebook and Instagram Shops, digital storefronts for selling products on Meta’s social networks and produced Live Shopping, a social media version of the home shopping network.
But this reliance on e-commerce was risky. It’s easy for companies buying digital ads to pivot quickly when those ads no longer lead to sales.
The company was following a similarly optimistic prediction as it plunged into virtual reality. For years, Zuckerberg has pitched a lofty vision of the metaverse, an immersive world that he argued would become the next great computing platform after mobile phones — a revolution that Meta failed to take advantage of.
Meta paid VR developers salaries of up to $1 million. Facebook’s owner is now in financial trouble.
But when Zuckerberg renamed the company Meta in October 2021, reflecting a new emphasis on virtual reality, employees greeted the move with trepidation. Some inside Reality Labs, Meta’s virtual reality division, were happy to be the new center of gravity but worried about the increased scrutiny on a division that hadn’t yet achieved commercial success. “We are no longer a footnote. We are a line item,” one former employee said.
Since Meta’s 2014 acquisition of the virtual reality company Oculus, its investment in hardware development and research has exploded. Meta has tried to build everything including augmented reality glasses, smartwatches and VR headsets, sometimes deploying different teams to work on different generations of the same device at the same time.
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“It was built like a software company that was trying to experiment instead of a mature hardware company that was trying to build hardware,” one former employee said.
The company has stuck with products long after it was clear they weren’t appealing to users. Since 2018, Meta has been pitching its video calling devices, Portal, as a next-generation communication device.
Meta pushes metaverse as the new office. Will corporate America buy it?
But behind the scenes, employees would regularly bring up data showing that the devices were missing their sales targets. Users who did buy them didn’t use them frequently.
“They missed their goals regularly,” one former employee said. “But everyone knew that didn’t matter.”
Instead of quashing the product, Meta rebranded: During the pandemic, Portal was pitched as a business product for remote work. It wasn’t until 2022 that the company finally scrapped the devices, which had then grown to include four different versions.
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Similar issues plague the company’s Quest headsets, which were intended to provide an on-ramp to Meta’s virtual reality app, Horizon Worlds, and other third-party apps. Instead, Meta executives found that buyers often use them for only a few weeks. And users who do use the headsets often flock to competing apps, such as Rec Room and VRChat.
VR developers accuse Facebook of withholding the keys to metaverse success
Meta has been losing billions trying to turn its metaverse vision into a reality. Reality Labs lost more than $13.7 billion last year — up from the $10.2 billion it lost in 2021 and the $6.6 billion in 2020, according to regulatory filings.
John Carmack, the former chief technology officer of Oculus and a high-ranking consultant for the company’s virtual reality division, quit in December, frustrated he couldn’t fix the inefficiencies plaguing the division, despite his high rank and relative power.
“We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort,” Carmack wrote in his goodbye message. “There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy.”
By early 2022, Meta’s optimism started to fade. The company reported that its flagship app, Facebook, lost daily users for the first time in its decade as a public company — falling by about half a million users in the last three months of 2021. The company’s stock plunged by more than a quarter.
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That summer, Zuckerberg and other executives began signaling internally that managers needed to identify their lowest-performing employees. Newly implemented hiring freezes threw the entire human resources and recruiting division into a tailspin. Over the coming months, the company rescinded job offers or didn’t bother hiring recruiters’ recommended applicants.
Facebook workers fear cuts after blunt warnings from Zuckerberg, leaders
The blunt messaging from Zuckerberg and other leaders created a wave of anxiety and resentment among Facebook’s workforce. Employees worried they could lose their jobs, receive lower annual bonuses or that an already rigorous corporate environment would grow even more competitive, the people said.
Zuckerberg stands out in Silicon Valley as one of the few founders who still leads a big tech giant long after its initial public offering, and he controls 61 percent of voting shares — leaving his power virtually unchecked.
Critics say Zuckerberg often surrounds himself with longtime deputies who have spent much of their careers working within Meta’s systems and culture, limiting the range of perspectives he is likely to receive.
Former COO Sheryl Sandberg, often thought of as a “co-CEO,” left last year. Zuckerberg tapped Javier Olivan, who had been working at the company since 2007, to take a more limited COO role — splitting up her role among several different executives, the majority of whom had worked at the company about a decade or more. (In recent years, Meta has appointed new members to its board and elevated Global Affairs President Nick Clegg.)
Meta expected to join tech industry’s growing list of layoffs
“These are all talented and experienced leaders who I’ve worked closely with over the years, and I’m confident they’ll continue to do great work in this new structure,” Zuckerberg said at the time.
When the layoffs came in November, deciding who to cut was left to top executives — not individual managers, according to a person familiar with the matter. When media reports surfaced that thousands of employees would be laid off a few days before the company’s own announcement, Bosworth, along with other top Meta executives, decided not to address the matter. The article was “vague” and staffers were still being productive, so they didn’t adjust their long-standing layoff plans, Bosworth said, according to a recording obtained by The Post.
“I got this wrong. It was a big mistake,” Zuckerberg said at the same meeting, referring to his overestimating revenue. “Going forward — what this means — is we have to be a leaner and more capital-efficient company.”
Meta could cut thousands of jobs, after CEO predicted no more layoffs
The company is now in the midst of its second round of layoffs, eliminating 4,000 jobs this month.
At a town hall this month, Zuckerberg provided a forceful defense of why workers should stay at the company: No other tech firm is delivering social experiences to billions of people in the way that Meta is.
“At the end of the day, I hope that you are here because you believe in the work that we are doing,” Zuckerberg said. “This is very special place.”
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FAQs
How does Mark Zuckerberg treat his employees? ›
Zuckerberg sees all employees as equal and encourages them to share ideas. By removing hierarchies, he is also simultaneously removing barriers between executives and other employees. Furthermore, he has legitimacy and is deeply involved with the company.
Did Meta give thousands of employees poor performance reviews? ›Facebook parent company Meta gave thousands of employees poor reviews, indicating that more layoffs could be coming after the company laid off 13 percent of its staff in November 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported Feb. 17. The poor reviews come after CEO Mark Zuckerberg said 2023 would be a "year of efficiency."
How does Mark Zuckerberg motivate his employees? ›In addition to taking risks himself, Zuckerberg also believes in motivating and empowering his employees. He regularly encourages them to be creative, take risks, and try new things.
Who is the owner of Meta company? ›Mark Zuckerberg is the founder, chairman and CEO of Meta, which he originally founded as Facebook in 2004. He is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for the company.
Why is Meta laying off employees? ›Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday said the company is laying off an additional 10,000 workers to hedge against economic instability that could persist for "many years."
How many people are being laid off by Meta? ›With 11,000 job cuts announced in November and the 10,000 announced last month, Meta's headcount will fall to around 66,000 — a total reduction of about 25%. The Twitter logo is displayed on the exterior of Twitter headquarters on October 26, 2022 in San Francisco, California.
Does Meta treat employees well? ›Does Meta pay their employees well? According to anonymously submitted Glassdoor reviews, Meta employees rate their compensation and benefits as 4.6 out of 5.
Is it a bad idea to work for Meta? ›Meta offers really great benefits and decent pay. Culture is struggling right now with cuts and layoffs. It is a high-intensity and data-driven company. My experience was that the teams at Meta were great, but the leadership was very disconnected.
Is Meta firing employees? ›Meta cuts 10,000 more jobs after announcing layoff of 11,000 employees in 2022. The tech giant will also eliminate 5,000 open roles in the coming months.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of Mark Zuckerberg? ›Zuckerberg focuses on his strengths in product design and strategy, while delegating tasks at which he is weak — day-to-day management and operation — to people with more experience in those areas.
What leadership style does Mark Zuckerberg use? ›
Mark Zuckerberg is known as an entrepreneur, programmer, and philanthropist. His transformational leadership style can be described as aggressive, demanding, innovative, and encouraging.
What is the Zuckerberg effect being the best boss? ›Confidence and respect
Zuckerberg doesn't follow traditional hierarchy and welcomes ideas and feedback from everyone, even entry-level employees. The staff like the idea of their CEO being a co-employee, as well as a boss. He comes across as being honest and transparent in his actions.
Meta can be used as an acronym for “most effective tactics available,” and calling something “meta” means that it's an effective way to achieve the goal of the game, whether it's to beat other players or beat the game itself.
Is Meta Chinese owned? ›Meta Platforms, Inc., formerly named Facebook, Inc., and TheFacebook, Inc., is an American multinational technology conglomerate based in Menlo Park, California. The company owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, among other products and services.
How does Meta make money? ›Meta Platforms Inc. sells ads on social media websites and mobile applications and also sells augmented- and virtual-reality products and services. Advertising sales are the primary source of Meta's revenue.
Are Meta employees happy? ›An internal Meta survey from October that Recode obtained reflects these employees' perspectives: Only 28 percent of employees responding to the survey gave a favorable response about their optimism for the company, and 58 percent were favorable toward the company overall.
What is the no of Meta employees? ›Meta Platforms total number of employees in 2022 was 86,482, a 20.16% increase from 2021.
Does Meta give stock to employees? ›You may receive stock awards upon being hired, as a part of your annual compensation package, or as a special award. Your stock awards become available to you as they vest over time. Meta's vesting schedule is split evenly over 4 years. This means you get 25% of your equity each year.
What positions get laid off first? ›Who Usually Gets Laid Off First and When? Newer employees that have been in their role up to a year tend to get laid off first, according to a 2022 study by LinkedIn and Business Insider.
What roles are affected by Meta layoffs? ›Meta has begun laying off staff in some technical roles as part of its latest round of job cuts, the company confirms. Employees in fields like software engineering, graphics programming and gameplay development were among those affected Wednesday, according to LinkedIn posts.
Is Amazon firing employees? ›
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy explains that the company is planning to be more streamlined in its costs and headcount due to the uncertain economy and future. Amazon has decided to let go of 9,000 more employees after the concluding the second phased of its operating plan.
Do Meta employees get free food? ›In 2022, the Times reported that the company was moving its free dinner service half an hour later to 6:30 p.m. and eliminating to-go containers in an effort to cut back on employees that would take the meal home. The company also eliminated its free laundry and dry-cleaning service last year, per the Times.
How many hours a week do Meta employees work? ›On average, how many hours do you work a day at Meta? 20 hours a week.
Who are the highest paid Meta employees? ›Engineering Manager is the highest-paying job at Meta with an average salary of $223,757 and an average hourly rate of $107.58.
What is the disadvantage of Meta? ›The Disadvantages of Meta-Analysis
The main problem is the potential for publication bias and skewed data. Research generating results that don't reject null hypotheses may tend to remain unpublished, or risk not being entered into a database.
Facebook (the parent company) has changed its name to Meta, in reference tothe metaverse, which combines social media with virtual and augmented reality — this will be the company's main focus moving forward. The social media platform will still be called Facebook and won't be affected by the rebranding.
What is the average age of Meta employees? ›What is the average age of employees at Meta? The most common age range of Meta employees is 20-30 years. 49% of Meta employees are between the ages of 20-30 years.
Is Meta laying off more than 11 000 employees? ›Meta announced another round of significant layoffs on Tuesday, as the parent company of Facebook and Instagram said it would cut about 10,000 jobs. The move comes four months after Meta cut 13% of its workforce, or more than 11,000 people. “This will be tough and there's no way around that.
Is Meta laying off new hires? ›Over two rounds of layoffs, in November and March, Meta said it will be cutting about 21,000 jobs. After plummeting in 2022, Meta's stock price has bounced back this year on optimism that massive cost cuts will boost profitability.
What are the failures faced by Mark Zuckerberg? ›Among the greatest challenges Zuckerberg had to put up with is finding investors for his social network. Since Facebook was a one-of-a-kind platform in the beginning, not many people believed in its potential. As such, he had to struggle to secure funding and bring investors on board.
What is the weakness of Meta company? ›
The following are among Meta's major weaknesses: Low diversification, with primary dependence on social networking. High vulnerability to online advertising trends. Imitable business model and services.
How does Facebook treat their employees? ›The atmosphere of the company is very loose and casual, and it's an environment that well-suits extroverts. Colleagues want you to speak out, say what's on your mind, and be an active participant in all aspects of work. In fact, you could even say you're rewarded for being an extrovert!
What are 5 leadership lessons from Mark Zuckerberg? ›- Everything is possible in this world. ...
- Age is not a deterrent to achieving success and leadership. ...
- Don't chase money but chase your passion to enable the money to run behind you. ...
- Follow the road that is less traveled. ...
- Focus on your goals firmly. ...
- Spot your talents and push forward.
One of Zuckerberg's greatest strengths is his ability to hire and lead talented teams.
What skills and behaviors does Mark Zuckerberg possess? ›He has a vision and proceeds to work on the direction of the direction to reach the goals. He is also creative and innovative, he is never afraid to risk, he is social responsible, he has an open communication with his staff and he focuses on group relationships and sensitivity to his people.
What are the 5 types of bad bosses Mark Zuckerberg? ›The key to a thriving business staffed with a motivated, productive workforce is to avoid promoting imposters, rationalizers, glory seekers, loners, or shooting stars.
What is Mark Zuckerberg most passionate about? ›Mark Zuckerberg is passionate about using technology to connect people, but he has also put in the hard work to make his passion pay off.
What did Mark Zuckerberg do to become rich and successful? ›He is known for co-founding the social media website Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook, Inc.), of which he is the executive chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling shareholder.
What is a Meta strategy? ›metastrategy (plural metastrategies) An overarching strategy determining which other strategies to use in a given situation.
What is an example of a Meta? ›"Meta" is used to describe something self-referential (self-aware). For example, when somebody's making a movie about making a movie - that's meta. Or when you're writing a post on Facebook about being on Facebook, telling a joke about jokes, or reading a story about reading stories.
Why is everything called Meta now? ›
The name was chosen to echo the key product that Zuckerberg hopes Facebook – now Meta – will be represented by: the metaverse, the name for a shared online 3D virtual space that a number of companies are interested in creating as a sort of future version of the internet.
Who is the biggest owner of Meta stock? ›The top individual insider shareholders of Meta are Michael Schroepfer, David Fischer, and David Wehner, and the top institutional shareholders are Mark Zuckerberg, Vanguard Group Inc., and BlackRock Inc.
Who owns TikTok? ›TikTok, which has over 150 million American users, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Chinese technology firm ByteDance Ltd., which appoints its executives. ByteDance is based in Beijing but registered in the Cayman Islands, as is common for privately owned Chinese companies.
How money has Meta lost? ›Meta lost almost two-thirds of its value last year as metaverse costs soared and the company's core online ad business suffered from a struggling economy, increased competition from TikTok and Apple's privacy update, limiting ad targeting.
Does Meta have a lot of debt? ›Meta Platforms net long-term debt for the twelve months ending March 31, 2023 was $17.692B, a 1200.93% decline year-over-year.
Does Meta Pay taxes? ›Meta Platforms income taxes for the twelve months ending March 31, 2023 were $5.774B, a 21.45% decline year-over-year. Meta Platforms annual income taxes for 2022 were $5.619B, a 29% decline from 2021. Meta Platforms annual income taxes for 2021 were $7.914B, a 96.18% increase from 2020.
Does Facebook treat their employees well? ›Thanks to the premium Facebook places on its employees' happiness, the tech giant has proven itself to be the gold standard for employers. Headquartered in Menlo Park, California, Facebook just topped Glassdoor's Employees' Choice Awards, which features the 100 best places to work in 2018 across the US.
How much does Mark Zuckerberg pay his employees? ›| CEO Name | CEO Pay | Median Employee Pay |
|---|---|---|
| Mark Zuckerberg | CEO Pay $26,823,061 | Median Employee Pay $292,785 |
At Facebook, utilizing open space well is exactly what the company seems to be doing, as Facebook employees are reportedly the happiest and most satisfied with their work, compared to peers at companies like Apple, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Tesla.
Why Facebook reduce employees? ›Facebook's parent company Meta is laying off another 10,000 workers, or roughly 12% of its workforce, in order to cut costs and shore up efficiency, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday.
How many Facebook employees got fired? ›
Facebook parent Meta lays off 11,000 workers CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologizes for the layoffs, which represent the first large-scale workforce reduction in the company's 18-year history.
How many employees are being laid off from Facebook? ›In a “small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes.” “Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven't yet hired,” Zuckerberg said.
Is Meta a good employer? ›For years, Apple and Meta have been deemed the creme de la creme of tech companies, with employees raving about their culture, values, benefits and perks.
Is Facebook losing employees? ›Facebook parent Meta is laying off 11,000 people, about 13 percent of its workforce, as it contends with faltering revenue and broader tech industry woes, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a letter to employees Wednesday.
Are employees happy at Facebook? ›Despite a seeming lack of faith in the company's goals, most Facebook employees are still happy to work there, with 69% of them reporting in the same survey that it is a favorable place to work , down only half a point from the year before.
Who is the highest paid employee at Facebook? ›In 2021, Chief Operating Officer (CPO) Sheryl Sandberg was the highest-paid Facebook employee with a total compensation of over 35 million U.S. dollars, up by over ten million in 2020.
Is Meta laying off more employees? ›And it announced yesterday it will cut another 10,000 jobs. This follows 11,000 layoffs at Meta last November. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that 2023 will be Meta's, quote, "year of efficiency." He also says it will be, in his words, stronger and more nimble.
Who is the highest paid employee in Facebook? ›The highest-paying job at Facebook is a Senior Executive with a salary of ₹591.0 Lakhs per year. The top 10% of employees earn more than ₹127.73 lakhs per year. The top 1% earn more than a whopping ₹541.56 lakhs per year.
Why did Facebook layoff so many employees? ›Mr. Zuckerberg is culling employees after years of hiring at a breakneck pace. His company gobbled up workers as its family of apps, which also includes WhatsApp, became popular worldwide. The coronavirus pandemic also supercharged the use of mobile apps, leading to more growth.
Are people happier after quitting Facebook? ›"Deactivation caused small but significant improvements in well-being, and in particular on self-reported happiness, life satisfaction, depression, and anxiety," the researchers concluded. "Effects on subjective well-being as measured by responses to brief daily text messages are positive but not significant."
Does Facebook have bad work life balance? ›
However, the retention rate at Facebook is quite high, with employees staying for an average of 2.3 years. Work-life balance may have some sway on workers leaving, as 37% of Facebook workers aren't satisfied with their work-life balance and 47% of them feel burnout at work.