Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is reportedly expecting to need to initiate wide-reaching layoffs this coming week in what is being called the largest layoff the industry has experienced in an extremely long time.
A report from the Wall Street Journal stated that the company informed its current employees to cancel all travel plans for this coming week as the predicted layoffs could start as soon as this coming Wednesday.
The total number of people being laid off from the 87,000 people that Meta employs could end up being much greater than the almost 3,700 people that were let go late last week at social media titan Twitter by the company’s new owner, Elon Musk, explained the report, going further to add that this would be the very first time that the company has kicked off such far-reaching layoffs in the over twenty years it has been in business.
The report indicated that the company was planning to cut staff as a means to drop expenses by “at least 10% in the coming months, in part through staff reductions.”
Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO, explained to his employees this past Summer, “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”
Zuckerberg went on to state that his company was going to put heavy emphasis on just a few areas seen as “high priority growth areas.”
“So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year,” explained Zuckerberg this past month. “In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”
The overall value of stock for the company has drastically dropped by well over 70% this year due to a large number of reasons and many investors have wanted to push the company to drastically scale back its odd ambitions for its metaverse by putting a hard cap on the level of funding issued to it by the company.
“Like many other companies in a zero rate world — Meta has drifted into the land of excess — too many people, too many ideas, too little urgency,” expressed Altimeter Capital Brad Gerstner in a letter addressed to Zuckerberg. “This lack of focus and fitness is obscured when growth is easy but deadly when growth slows and technology changes.”
The company went on to push Zuckerberg to slash a total of 20% of the workforce for the company.
The report indicated that users have been “largely unimpressed” by the metaverse project from Meta, which has come with a staggering price tag of almost $15 billion since last year.
“I get that a lot of people might disagree with this investment,” stated Zuckerberg. “I think people are going to look back on decades from now and talk about the importance of the work that was done here.”