Furious Zuckerberg’s Facebook showdown
A bunch of you shouldn’t be here, he tells staff as his social media earnings fall
GRUMPY billionaire Mark Zuckerberg laid into staff at a tense meeting, telling them: ‘A bunch of you shouldn’t be here’.
The founder of tech giant Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said it was facing the ‘worst downturn we’ve seen’ and employees who did not want to work hard should leave.
Zuckerberg, 38, was said to have become ‘visibly frustrated’ when one employee asked if extra holidays from the pandemic would continue. A leaked recording of the meeting emerged as Meta last night announced its first ever drop in revenue. Company shares dived five per cent after revenue fell to £23.7billion for the three months to the end of June from £23.9billion a year earlier.
The company has lost half its value as its advertising business struggles to rebound from Covidrelated challenges. Video-sharing app TikTok has become a serious competitor and Instagram is under fire over a redesign.
During the weekly Q&A with staff, reported by tech website The Verge, Zuckerberg said the economy was heading for one of the ‘worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history’.
He insisted: ‘Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here. And part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals – and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit – is that I think some of you might just say that this place isn’t for you. And that self-selection is OK with me.’ When an employee asked if ‘Meta Days’ – extra time off introduced during the pandemic – would continue in 2023, Zuckerberg appeared to stumble as he tried to contain his anger.
He said: ‘Given my tone in the rest of the Q&A, you can probably imagine what my reaction to this is.’ He added that the days would be cancelled later this year.
Facebook staff were split on the boss’s approach at the Q&A with some workers hailing Zuckerberg as a ‘war-time CEO’ on an internal message board. Others pointed out that Meta had hired the people it was now telling to leave. Earlier this month, Meta had a market value of £462billion – making it the seventh biggest firm in the world.