Meta's plan to slash 20% of staff looms as ai bill hits $600b
Meta is quietly preparing to hand as many as 15,800 employees their walking papers, according to multiple Reuters sources, a purge that would dwarf every lay-off since Zuckerberg’s 2022 “year of efficiency” bloodbath.
Executives ordered to draw up fresh org charts
The directive landed on senior leaders’ desks last week: draft “post-lay-off” blueprints and keep them locked until the axe falls. No calendar date has been nailed to the wall, but head-count stood at 79 000 on 31 December. A 20 % slice equals the entire population of a small city—gone.
Meta’s spokesperson waved the warning away as “speculative reporting about theoretical approaches,” yet the math is stubborn. The last time Zuckerberg spoke of “theory,” 21 000 people cleared their desks in two waves.
Ai gold rush fuels the human drain
While HR spreadsheets turn red, the balance sheet bleeds green for silicon. The company has vowed to spend $600 billion on ai data-centre infrastructure before 2028, luring star researchers with contracts fat enough to make academia weep. The contradiction is brutal: fire thousands, hire dozens at king’s-ransom salaries, and let code do the rest.
Wall Street noticed. Shares slid 3.83 % Friday, shaving $24.47 off a stock that flirted with $800 only weeks ago. After-hours traders nudged the loss to $27.72. The dip still leaves Meta closer to its 52-week high than to the $479 basement it haunted last spring.
Threads’ rocket ride masks the rot inside
Outside the boardroom, the narrative glows. Threads hit 100 million sign-ups in five days—faster than ChatGPT—and now claims 450 million monthly users, beating X’s daily actives on mobile in January. A shiny stat, but apps don’t pay severance.
Zuckerberg once renamed the whole company to signal a pivot beyond social feeds. Today the pivot looks more like a centrifuge: spin off flesh, spin up GPUs, and pray the remaining skeleton can carry the $600 billion crown.
The soldering-iron scent in Meta’s server rooms will soon mingle with something sharper: the metallic tang of fear. When the next all-hands arrives, the only slide that matters is the org chart—minus one brutal rectangle.