After laying off tens of thousands of Meta employees, Mark Zuckerberg shared some encouraging thoughts at a staff meeting Friday: At least we’re not as bad at Twitter as Elon Musk.
Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk
It’s never easy for corporate CEOs to tell their employees they’re losing their jobs. In the past week or so, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have laid off a combined total of nearly 15,000 employees.
Elon Musk laid off about 3,700 employees in an unsigned email after he had many of them working most of that previous weekend. Mark Zuckerberg, for his part, issued a signed memo to employees explaining his decision to eliminate 11,000 jobs and taking responsibility for the company’s over-hiring during the tech industry’s “epidemic dividend.
On Friday, Mark Zuckerberg and other executives held a town hall meeting for the remaining employees and answered their questions. During the question-and-answer session, one employee asked a question about Twitter layoffs, and Mark Zuckerberg joined the discussion, according to those in attendance.
He said that different companies treat layoffs differently and that it is important to be thoughtful. He also added that Elon Musk had just taken over Twitter and clearly didn’t have time to plan as thoughtfully as many other companies like Meta. He noted that if you don’t give thoughtful consideration to layoffs, chaos can occur. He also acknowledged that even though the company had thought deeply about it, there were still many questions that didn’t have good answers.
In addition, at the staff meeting, an employee asked whether the remaining employees were facing further layoffs. Mark Zuckerberg responded that while the company had no plans for further layoffs in the coming weeks, he could not “make any promises,” according to an attendee.
Meta is one of several tech companies that have begun mass layoffs in recent months. Earlier this year, Snap announced it would cut 20 percent of its workforce. Ride-hailing giant Lyft just laid off 700 employees. Fintech giant Stripe laid off 14 percent of its workforce, or about 1,000 people.
