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| Mark Zuckerberg |
Meta co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Mark
Zuckerberg, is reportedly taking the same path with Twitter’s Elon Musk by
sacking workers to save his firm’s earnings.
There have been claims that social media companies grew too
fast, especially in workforce, placing a burden on their turnover amid dip in
ads earnings.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Meta, parent firm of Facebook,
had hired over 27,000 employees in 2020 and 2021 to meet the demands from rapid
migration among global population seeking entertainment online during the
lockdown.
In the first nine months of this year, the company had also
employed 15,344 additional workers, taking the number of workforce to about
87,314.
With free cash flow depreciating by 98% due to
out-of-control expenses, plummeting ads, profit drop thanks to intense
competition from TikTok, Meta can no longer bear the financial burden of the
workforce, and investors are distancing themselves from the firm, causing share
to devalue by -73.18% year-to-date.
The sack is expected to be communicated to affected workers
on Wednesday. This is part of the company’s move to cut expenses down 10%, Wall
Street Journal reported on Sunday.
Zuckerberg had stated on October 26 that Meta will now focus
investment on key growth areas, which means some departments will see more
workers join them, while some departments will lose colleagues to the sack.
“So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most
other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year.” Zuckerberg explained.
He stated that, “In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as
either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we
are today.”
His decision to cut workforce is similar to that of Musk,
who said he had to sack workers at Twitter because the microblogging site was
losing $4 million per day due to large staff.
Twitter have about 7,000 workers, and around 3,500 employees
are reportedly going to lose their jobs in Musk’s sacking spree to save the
finances of the firm, which is also losing ad earnings.