Alex Wong / Getty Images / AFP
Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook
“I decided to raise the bar for performance management and get rid of poorly performing employees more quickly,” says the CEO of Meta. 5% of staff will be laid off.
A Meta plans to lay off around 3,600 employees considered inefficient, before hiring employees to take their places starting this year, according to an internal memo sent Tuesday to its employees.
The parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp confirmed to AFP that boss Mark Zuckerberg decided to fire 5% of staff. Meta employed about 72,400 people in September.
“I decided to raise the bar on performance management and get rid of underperforming employees faster“, states the CEO in the note.
Meta had already laid off several thousand workers in 2023, declaring it the “year of efficiency” in the wake of the pandemic.
Firing some workers based on performance is a common practice in large American companies. A similar decision was announced in Microsoft last week, according to , affecting less than 1% of the group’s employees.
More insults allowed on Instagram and Facebook
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg in the United States, aimed at combating misinformation on his platforms and seen as “censorship” against conservatives by the American right.
Instead of independent organizations, users will be able to add context to certain posts, like on Elon Musk’s social network X.
The leader also put an end to programs designed to promote diversity of employees and content moderation rules on Facebook and Instagram were relaxed. From now on more insults and calls for the exclusion of women and LGBTQIA+ people from institutions will be allowed.
In the biggest podcast in the world, The Joe Rogan Experience, by Joe Rogan, broadcast last Friday, Zuckerberg, who believes that companies need more “masculine energy”: it is good to “celebrate aggressiveness a little more”, he highlighted.
“I think masculine energy is good and obviously society has a lot of that, but I think corporate culture was really trying to move away from it,” he said.
“It’s like we want feminine energy and masculine energy, I think that’s all good. But I think corporate culture has turned into something a little more neutered,” he added, “and I think having a culture that celebrates aggression a little more has its own merits that are really positive.”
New links to Trump, Musk and Dana White
Meta’s decision, however, is part of a series of announcements aimed at transforming the social media giant in the age of Donald Trump e Elon Musk.
“I think a large part of our society has become (…) emasculated, in a way, or emasculated,” Zuckerberg told Rogan, in the extended interview broadcast on Friday.
Like many of his neighbors and competitors in Silicon Valley, Zuckerberg has made repeated advances toward Donald Trump.
in November, he donated $1 million to his Jan. 20 inauguration ceremony and appointed several of his allies to key positions.
On the other hand, the entrepreneur Dana Whitepresident of the UFC martial arts sports league and supporter of Donald Trump, now sits on Meta’s board.
The appointment was announced by Zuckerberg on Facebook, where he added that Charlie Songhurst, a technology investor who has been advising Meta on artificial intelligence, and John Elkann, CEO of Exor, a holding company that owns several automotive brands and other companies, will also make part of the board of directors.
