Turns out, Twitter is not the only Big Tech company that will be engaging in mass layoffs — “Chief Twit” Elon Musk opted to fire half the Twitter workforce last week explaining that the company was losing over $4 million a day, and considering that the platform continued operating without a hitch there was evidently plenty of fat to cut.
Facebook parent company Meta Platforms is planning large-scale layoffs that may begin as soon as Wednesday, according to the Wall Street Journal.
At a company-wide meeting back in June, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered this ominous message to employees, “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”
Well, that assertion is about to play out in real-time, with Meta already informing employees to cancel nonessential travel beginning this week, the WSJ reported. The company employed more than 87,000 people at the end of September.
Meta is the worst performer in the S&P 500 in 2022 with shares down 73% this year, according to CNBC, the company’s lowest since early 2016.
In October, Meta forecasted a weak holiday quarter and significantly more costs next year wiping about $67 billion off Meta’s stock market value, this coming in addition to the more than half a trillion dollars in lost value this year.
“In 2023, we’re going to focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas,” Zuckerberg said in an earnings call in late October, according to WSJ. “That means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”
Meta is facing a number of challenges, as noted by Reuters, including “slowing global economic growth, competition from TikTok, privacy changes from Apple, concerns about massive spending on the metaverse and the ever-present threat of regulation.”
Shareholder Altimeter Capital Management sent Zuckerberg an open letter last month warning that Meta has lost investor confidence and that the company needs to streamline by cutting jobs and capital expenditure.
“Meta needs to re-build confidence with investors, employees and the tech community in order to attract, inspire, and retain the best people in the world,” Altimeter CEO Brad Gerstner wrote in the letter. “In short, Meta needs to get fit and focused.”
Meanwhile, Meta was excited to announce recently the creation of full-body avatars that “will let you customize your avatar even further and be uniquely you.”
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Tom Tillison grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills. Tillison also contributes to BizPac Review.
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