Meta axes 700 staff as zuckerberg swaps metaverse for ai bet
Meta just handed pink slips to 700 engineers across Facebook and Reality Labs, the latest bloodletting in Mark Zuckerberg’s pivot from headsets to large language models. The firings, confirmed late Tuesday, land less than a year after the company torched $80 billion trying to make Horizon Worlds stick.
The body count keeps climbing
Sources inside Reality Labs tell me the cuts hit avatars teams, SDK crews and the entire Horizon storefront unit. One hardware veteran—still employed, for now—whispered over coffee at GDC that ‘the bean-counters finally admitted the metaverse burn rate was a CFO’s nightmare’. The numbers back him up: since 2020 Reality Labs has bled $13 billion in operating losses, roughly the GDP of Iceland.
Meta’s comms shop spins it as ‘restructuring for efficiency’. Translation: every dollar saved is being rerouted to generative ai projects, including a rumored personal digital clone for Zuckerberg himself. Employees offered ‘alternative roles’ are discovering the catch—relocate to Menlo Park or London, or take the severance. Remote-first is suddenly a fireable offense.
Horizon worlds dies twice
First came the soft kill: Meta pulled Horizon Worlds from the Quest store on 31 March. The hard shutdown arrives 15 June, erasing user worlds and creator revenues overnight. Indie devs who banked on Horizon’s revenue-share scheme are now scrambling to port content to Roblox and Fortnite. One creator I tracked in Austin saw monthly payouts plummet from $12k to zero in 48 hours. ‘We were unpaid beta testers,’ she said, voice shaking.
The strategic retreat is brutal but rational. Apple’s Vision Pro looms, SteamVR keeps chewing market share and enterprise buyers never bought the ‘workplace of the future’ pitch. Zuckerberg’s memo to staff, obtained by TechBloom, uses the phrase ‘ai-first roadmap’ four times in three paragraphs; the word ‘metaverse’ appears once, in parentheses.
Wall Street, ever allergic to sentiment, rewarded the layoffs with a 3 % after-hours bump. Analysts at Morgan Stanley upgraded the stock, praising ‘capital discipline’. Meanwhile, 700 families update LinkedIn. The algorithm giveth, the algorithm taketh away.
Meta’s next earnings call is 30 days away. Expect CFO Susan Li to tout ‘efficiency gains’ while dodging questions on exactly how many GPUs $80 billion could have bought instead of virtual real estate no one visited. The metaverse isn’t dead; it was never alive. But the invoice just cleared—and 700 engineers are paying it in full.