A fortnight ago Meta told its shareholders it expected headcount at the end of 2023 to be “approximately in-line with third quarter 2022 levels”. Now 11,000 employees at the former Facebook – 13% of the total – will receive a sacking email, the brutal American way of making redundancies. The cartoonish avatars, on the other hand, survive. There was no hint of a backwards step by Mark Zuckerberg on spending on his precious virtual reality metaverse, despite howls of protest from irate investors about how much it is costing and how returns are uncertain.
But the cull of jobs – so soon after a suggestion that muddling through with hiring freezes would suffice – suggests Zuckerberg is rattled. He has messed up monumentally, as he weakly conceded, by adding almost 20,000 staff in the last 12 months in anticipation of an advertising boom that did not materialise. The share price is down by three-quarters this year. If there was ever a moment for non-Zuckerberg shareholders to insist on equal voting rights, this is it.
