Mass layoffs in tech spread to Meta, corporate parent of Facebook
Meta Platform, Inc., parent of the popular social media platform Facebook, will begin mass layoffs on Wednesday in what will likely be the biggest of the growing job cuts among high tech firms.
A report in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, based on sources familiar with the impending layoffs, said that “many thousands of employees” among the Meta staff of 87,000 will lose their jobs this week. Representatives from the $86 billion global tech monopoly, based in Menlo Park, California, declined to comment on the report.
The layoffs will be the largest staff reduction ever in the 18-year-old company founded and still run by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg. The news comes after several recent reports that Meta was already making job cuts. Meta owns Facebook (2.9 billion users), Instagram (2 billion users) and WhatsApp (2 billion users), the number one, three and four most popular social media platforms in the world.
During an earnings call with investors on October 26, Zuckerberg said the company would “focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas,” and that means “most of our teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year.” Zuckerberg said Meta would end 2023 “either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization.”
In mid-September, the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta had begun “quietly nudging out a significant number of staffers” in a drive to cut costs by 10 percent. The report said that the cuts were “expected to be a prelude to deeper cuts,” and that the majority of the cost reduction would “come from reduced employment,” according to unnamed individuals familiar with the plans.
As far back as July, Zuckerberg told employees during a call that the company was facing one of the “worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history” and that workers should prepare to do more work with fewer resources. He added, “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”
The mass layoffs at Meta/Facebook follow by several days the jobs massacre at Twitter in which half the staff of 7,500 was eliminated by the billionaire and wealthiest man in the world Elon Musk shortly after he assumed private ownership of the microblogging platform. The layoffs were precipitated by a previously existing financial crisis that was exacerbated when advertisers began pulling out of Twitter after Musk took over the company and fired its executive leadership and board of directors.
According to a Crunchbase News summary, 45,000 tech jobs had been eliminated before the cuts at Twitter were announced. Among the tech firms to announce layoffs recently include the rideshare company Lyft (650 jobs or 13 percent), payment processor Stripe (1,120 jobs or 14 percent), Shopify (1,000 jobs or 10 percent), Snap (cutting 1,000 jobs or 20 percent) and Coinbase (1,100 jobs or 18 percent).
Along with Meta, the larger tech corporations Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet have announced a combination of cost-cutting programs and hiring freezes. These five companies combined have lost approximately $3 trillion on the stock market since the beginning of the year and quarterly earnings reports last week drove their collective share values down by $218 billion last Friday alone.
Deliberately driving up unemployment to beat back rising demands for wage increases, the economic slowdown is being brought on by the Federal Reserve. The Fed’s six consecutive interest rate increases, including another 0.75 percentage point rise on November 2, is rapidly impacting the tech industries. These are among the first sections of the working class to be hit by what is coming throughout the rest of the economy in the coming months.
According to an assessment in the Journal on October 28: “Tech companies that enjoyed strong growth in the early days of the pandemic are feeling the effects of a new reality of high inflation, rising interest rates, currency headwinds and other issues on their income statements. The slowdown in personal-computer sales and digital advertising seen earlier this year appears to be spreading to areas such as cloud computing that were thought to be resistant to economic weakness.”
The response of the financial oligarchy to the situation is to press the demand for tech workers to pay the price. Zuckerberg and the leadership of Meta are following a script laid out by investor and Altimeter Capital Chief Executive Brad Gerstner.
Gerstner, whose firm has $18 billion under management including 2.5 million Meta shares, issued an open letter to Zuckerberg on October 24 in which he said the company should slash its staff and cut back on its technology development plans such as the much-touted metaverse project.
The investor called for a reduction of the Meta staff by 20 percent or a devastating 17,000 employees. Referring to the change in the borrowing environment, Gerstner wrote, “Like many other companies in a zero-rate world—Meta has drifted into the land of excess—too many people, too many ideas, too little urgency.”
He continued, “It is a poorly kept secret in Silicon Valley that companies ranging from Google to Meta to Twitter to Uber could achieve similar levels of revenue with far fewer people.”
A measure of the ruthlessness of the billionaire elite in demanding the destruction of jobs in tech industries was the fact that the value of Meta stock rose by 3 percent on Monday following the Wall Street Journal report. The shares have lost more than 70 percent of their value so far in 2022.
high tech fires 60,000 employees even as they howl for amnesty and no caps on visas to keep importing 'cheap' labor foreigners.
Twitter, Meta, Amazon: Why is Everyone Getting Fired?
Mark Zuckerberg spent $419 million, which enabled far-left activists to target specific key districts in swing states, redesign ballots to their advantage, overrule local elected officials on how elections were to be run, and even infiltrate sacrosanct electoral infrastructure.
In sum, while the I.R.S. authorities turned a blind eye towards his illegal
activities Mark Zuckerberg used his enormous wealth to help fix the 2020
presidential election for Joe Biden — and the January 2021 Senate
runoff races for Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, all the while reducing
his own tax bill. Zuckerberg did this on the pretext that he was simply
seeking to help ordinary Americans find a way to participate safely in the
electoral process during the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. Nothing could
have been further from the truth. DAVID HOROWITZ & JOHN PERAZZO
Big media and Big Tech colluded to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. A poll showed that nearly four of five Americans believe that “truthful” coverage would have changed the outcome of that election.
Cutting legal immigration levels in half to about 500,000 admissions a year, ending the process known as “chain migration” where naturalized citizens can sponsor an unlimited number of foreign relatives, ending the Diversity Visa Lottery that randomly gives out 55,000 visas a year, mandating E-Verify nationwide to screen out illegal aliens from the hiring process, ending low-skilled immigration, and massively curbing illegal immigration with increased border enforcement and swift deportation. REP. BARBARA JORDON
By failures of border security, a lack of the enforcement of our immigration laws from within the interior of the United States and huge numbers of visas for high tech workers, the lives and livelihoods of Americans and their children, are being stolen by America’s corrupt political elite who are doing the bidding of those who provide them with huge “Campaign Contributions” (Orwellian euphemism for bribes) pursue legislation that is diametrically opposed to the best interests of America and Americans.
MICHAEL CUTLER
Mass layoffs in tech spread to Meta, corporate parent of Facebook
Meta Platform, Inc., parent of the popular social media platform Facebook, will begin mass layoffs on Wednesday in what will likely be the biggest of the growing job cuts among high tech firms.
A report in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, based on sources familiar with the impending layoffs, said that “many thousands of employees” among the Meta staff of 87,000 will lose their jobs this week. Representatives from the $86 billion global tech monopoly, based in Menlo Park, California, declined to comment on the report.
The layoffs will be the largest staff reduction ever in the 18-year-old company founded and still run by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg. The news comes after several recent reports that Meta was already making job cuts. Meta owns Facebook (2.9 billion users), Instagram (2 billion users) and WhatsApp (2 billion users), the number one, three and four most popular social media platforms in the world.
During an earnings call with investors on October 26, Zuckerberg said the company would “focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas,” and that means “most of our teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year.” Zuckerberg said Meta would end 2023 “either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization.”
In mid-September, the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta had begun “quietly nudging out a significant number of staffers” in a drive to cut costs by 10 percent. The report said that the cuts were “expected to be a prelude to deeper cuts,” and that the majority of the cost reduction would “come from reduced employment,” according to unnamed individuals familiar with the plans.
As far back as July, Zuckerberg told employees during a call that the company was facing one of the “worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history” and that workers should prepare to do more work with fewer resources. He added, “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”
The mass layoffs at Meta/Facebook follow by several days the jobs massacre at Twitter in which half the staff of 7,500 was eliminated by the billionaire and wealthiest man in the world Elon Musk shortly after he assumed private ownership of the microblogging platform. The layoffs were precipitated by a previously existing financial crisis that was exacerbated when advertisers began pulling out of Twitter after Musk took over the company and fired its executive leadership and board of directors.
According to a Crunchbase News summary, 45,000 tech jobs had been eliminated before the cuts at Twitter were announced. Among the tech firms to announce layoffs recently include the rideshare company Lyft (650 jobs or 13 percent), payment processor Stripe (1,120 jobs or 14 percent), Shopify (1,000 jobs or 10 percent), Snap (cutting 1,000 jobs or 20 percent) and Coinbase (1,100 jobs or 18 percent).
Along with Meta, the larger tech corporations Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet have announced a combination of cost-cutting programs and hiring freezes. These five companies combined have lost approximately $3 trillion on the stock market since the beginning of the year and quarterly earnings reports last week drove their collective share values down by $218 billion last Friday alone.
Deliberately driving up unemployment to beat back rising demands for wage increases, the economic slowdown is being brought on by the Federal Reserve. The Fed’s six consecutive interest rate increases, including another 0.75 percentage point rise on November 2, is rapidly impacting the tech industries. These are among the first sections of the working class to be hit by what is coming throughout the rest of the economy in the coming months.
According to an assessment in the Journal on October 28: “Tech companies that enjoyed strong growth in the early days of the pandemic are feeling the effects of a new reality of high inflation, rising interest rates, currency headwinds and other issues on their income statements. The slowdown in personal-computer sales and digital advertising seen earlier this year appears to be spreading to areas such as cloud computing that were thought to be resistant to economic weakness.”
The response of the financial oligarchy to the situation is to press the demand for tech workers to pay the price. Zuckerberg and the leadership of Meta are following a script laid out by investor and Altimeter Capital Chief Executive Brad Gerstner.
Gerstner, whose firm has $18 billion under management including 2.5 million Meta shares, issued an open letter to Zuckerberg on October 24 in which he said the company should slash its staff and cut back on its technology development plans such as the much-touted metaverse project.
The investor called for a reduction of the Meta staff by 20 percent or a devastating 17,000 employees. Referring to the change in the borrowing environment, Gerstner wrote, “Like many other companies in a zero-rate world—Meta has drifted into the land of excess—too many people, too many ideas, too little urgency.”
He continued, “It is a poorly kept secret in Silicon Valley that companies ranging from Google to Meta to Twitter to Uber could achieve similar levels of revenue with far fewer people.”
A measure of the ruthlessness of the billionaire elite in demanding the destruction of jobs in tech industries was the fact that the value of Meta stock rose by 3 percent on Monday following the Wall Street Journal report. The shares have lost more than 70 percent of their value so far in 2022.
Activist Investors Slam Google in Open Letter Demanding Headcount Reductions
Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. needs to take “aggressive action” to reduce costs and cut down its headcount according to activist investor TCI Fund Management.
Bloomberg reports that Google needs to quickly and aggressively reduce expenses and scale back its headcount according to investor TCI Fund Management. The fund outlined these requirements in a letter to the tech giant encouraging the company to begin making tough choices as job cuts continue throughout the entire tech industry.
TCI Managing Director Chris Hohn wrote Tuesday in an open letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai that management should be publicly setting a target for profit margins, increasing share buybacks, and reducing losses in its portfolio of “Other Bets.”
Hohn said: “We are writing to express our view that the cost base of Alphabet is too high and that management needs to take aggressive action. The company has too many employees and the cost per employee is too high.”
Company shares jumped as much as 4.6 percent to $100.14 after TCI posted the letter. This year, Alphabet’s stock has fallen by 34 percent. A slowdown in digital advertising has had a negative effect on the company’s ads business, with Alphabet reporting third-quarter earnings and revenue that missed projections in October.
Job cuts have affected the entire tech industry with Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon all announcing the layoffs of hundreds or in some cases thousands of employees. Google has yet to implement any major layoffs although the company has said that it was slowing the hiring of new employees.
TCI noted that Alphabet’s employee count has grown by 20 percent per year since 2017, noting that: “This growth is excessive, both in relation to historic headcount growth and what the business requires.”
Read more at Bloomberg here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan
Elon Musk to Twitter 2.0 Employees: Work Long Hours or You're Fired
Elon Musk sends an ultimatum to Twitter employees.
Since his take over of the company, the billionaire CEO has been on a war path with his employees, switching the social media company's previous rule allowing them to work from home.
His latest demand to the employees, who are remaining after he fired 50% of them, is to ask them to work long hours.
Musk, who serves as CEO of Twitter, sent an email to all employees on Nov. 16 and told them to expect to working "long hours at high intensity” or receive "three months of severance,” if they did not consent to these conditions, or support his vision for “Twitter 2.0.”
"Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade," the billionaire wrote.
"If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below," he continued. "Anyone who has not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow (Thursday) will receive three months of severance."
'I'm Working the Absolute'
The serial entrepreneur recently admitted that since taking over Twitter he hardly sleeps.
"I have too much work on my plate, that's for sure," Musk said on November 14, during an appearance at B20 Indonesia, a business conference running alongside the G20 summit in Bali. "I'm working the absolute most that I can work -- morning to night, seven days a week."
Musk also told attendees at the 29th annual Baron Investment Conference a few days earlier, that his workload has increased from 70 hours a week to 120.
"But, I think once Twitter is set on the right path, it will be much easier to manage than SpaceX or Tesla."
After Musk took the company private last month, he immediately fired the CEO, the CFO, and other high level executives. He also fired half of its staff by sending emails or revoking privileges from Slack or their laptops while contractors were laid off this week also without any notice.
His latest efforts to slash costs at the company have been widely publicized since he fired engineers who had long tenures at Twitter due to their disagreements with him either on the site or in the company's Slack channels, a messaging service used by employees.
His brash leadership style has also led to hasty decisions such as adding and pausing Twitter Blue, an $7.99 a month service for users to receive the once hailed blue check mark. But after many public companies such as pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly (LLY) - Get Free Report were impersonated and lost millions of dollars in market capitalization overnight, several ad and media buying agencies told their clients to stop advertising on the microblogging website.
Musk said on November 15 that a revamped Twitter Blue will be launched on Nov. 29
Amazon reportedly plans sweeping layoffs that could affect thousands of employees
Amazon could announce sweeping layoffs as early as this week, according to The New York Times. The company reportedly plans to cut approximately 10,000 corporate employees, with staff at its consumer-facing devices division among those who are likely to be affected by the move. Amazon employs approximately 1.5 million people globally. If the company moves forward with the cuts as reported, they would affect about three percent of its corporate workforce and would represent the largest reorganization in Amazon’s nearly 30-year history.
Amazon did not immediately respond to Engadget’s request for comment. Mass layoffs have been a frequent occurrence in the US tech sector in recent weeks. On November 9th, Facebook parent company Meta cut about 13 percent of its workforce, a move that saw more than 11,000 people lose their jobs at the social media giant. Before that, Twitter was decimated after Elon Musk ordered a 50 percent reducation of the company’s headcount. Over the weekend, the company also let go of most of its contract workers. Smaller firms like Lyft and Snap have laid off employees in recent months as well.
For Amazon, the planned layoffs are reflective of the company's changing fortunes. Thanks to early pandemic lockdown measures, the retail giant experienced record growth and went on a hiring spree that saw its workforce double. In recent months, however, the company has seen growth slow due to a combination of mounting costs and the return of in-person shopping. The company recently posted a $2 billion loss and froze hiring at its corporate offices.
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Survey: Corporate Diversity Drives Discrimination Against White Americans
Hiring managers face top-level corporate pressure to reject white job candidates in favor of non-white applicants, says a survey of 1,000 managers by a job-finding firm.
The company, ResumeBuilder.com, surveyed 1,000 hiring managers across the United States in November “to find out how many believe “reverse discrimination” is really an issue affecting their workplace,” the company said on November 7:
Key findings include:
52% believe their company practices “reverse discrimination” in hiring
1 in 6 have been asked to deprioritize hiring white men
48% have been asked to prioritize diversity over qualifications
53% believe their job will be in danger if they don’t hire enough diverse employees
70% believe their company has DEI initiatives for appearances’ sake
The “DEI” term is a variant of the Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity agenda pushed by executives and woke HR staffers in many companies.
The survey was launched by ResumeBuilder, and conducted via the Pollfish polling company:
This survey was commissioned by ResumeBuilder.com and conducted online by the survey platform Pollfish on November 2, 2022. In total, 1,000 participants in the U.S. were surveyed. All participants had to pass through demographic filters to ensure they were age 18 or older, currently employed for wages or self-employed, and manage at least 25% of the hiring at their workplace. For full survey results, please contact pr@resumebuilder.com.
ResumeBuilder.com did not respond to questions from Breitbart News.
Federal officials use court-enforced civic regulation — dubbed “civil rights law” — to grow the number of non-white people and immigrants in jobs sought by Americans, including many white job-seekers.
For example, the federal government penalizes companies that try to hire native-born Americans, and it usually ignores Fortune 500 companies that discriminate against Americans to hire non-white immigrants. In October 2021, the federal government imposed a very small fine of $14 million on Facebook amid evidence the company’s HR managers routinely used the federal visa-workers rules to preferentially hire cheap and compliant foreign workers instead of skilled American professionals.
In turn, that federal diversity goal is enforced by executives and by “woke” managers in company H.R. departments.
In October 2020, Bloomberg Law reported that “Diversity-Fueled ‘Reverse’ Bias Claims Put Employers in Quandary”:
… companies including Adidas AG, The Boeing Co., and Alphabet Inc.’s Google promised to increase their hiring of people of color and promote better inclusion, in the wake of escalated racial tensions that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis this summer.
Quotas and hiring preferences that exclude groups based on race or sex generally are illegal under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But diversity efforts, when done correctly, don’t need to be abandoned because of the fear of potential “reverse” discrimination liability, attorneys say.
The discrimination problem is exacerbated by federal visa-worker programs that allow companies to employ at least 1.5 million non-white, cheap foreign visa workers instead of skilled American professionals.
Max from Philadelphia told Breitbart News about his circumstances in a Fortune 500 company:
One guy is from China, the entire rest of the department is from India. … [and] all of our project managers are offshore in India now … [and] We’re starting to just hire more and more people in India.
In a prior job, Mike said, the flow of migrant workers allowed executives to push American professionals out of well-paid jobs:
That manager … told me “[Max], this is just the [strategy]: We treat you like crap, we don’t give you raises, we wait for you to either quit or to lose your temper. You lost your temper. We get to fire you. It’s just a game.” He literally told me those words.
The result is widespread underemployment among skilled American graduates, according to a September 2021 report by the Census Department.
The vast majority (62%) of [American] college-educated workers who majored in a STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] field were employed in non-STEM fields such as non-STEM management, law, education, social work, accounting or counseling …The path to STEM jobs for non-STEM majors was narrow. Only a few STEM-related majors (7%) and non-STEM majors (6%) ultimately ended up in STEM occupations.
The widespread replacement of Americans during the past 20 years had kept salaries flat, while also helping to spike stock values for Fortune 500 companies.
The inflow of foreign workers also changes the politics in Americans’ workplaces. The cliquish foreign workers — including foreign-born HR staffers — often try to get Americans fired so they can quietly sell the job to someone in their ethnic network, according to comments from several American tech workers. The skewed, non-professional politics of the so-called “green-card workforce” has deeply damaged companies such as Intel, Boeing, and Theranos.
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