Meta Is Cutting 10k Jobs Amid Shrinking Metaverse Goals

Meta experienced one of the largest layoffs last year in November. As per research, they are laying off 10,000 workers now.

The company has been witnessed to be moving away from its attention to the metaverse. Now Zuckerberg’s highly attentive towards efficiency, which is why he has removed 5k open roles.

A couple of days ago, Zuckerberg posted that the layoffs would be revealed to the workers in April for the tech team, and May for their business team.

Zuckerberg said that they want to lessen the number of their team size by approximately 10k people. The company also wants to close about 5k extra roles that were open and have not been employed as yet.

Apparently, this resonates with the CEO’s 2023 motive of paying more attention to efficiency this year. Zuckerberg added that he wants to make the firm more tech-based, hence the drastic change.

Last November, metaverse revealed they were letting go of around 11k workers, which was among their first major lay-offs in 18 years.

The dismissal is akin to the alterations by different tech companies because of economic uncertainty, e.g. Microsoft has let go of 10k workers, and Google has laid off 12k employees, and Salesforce by removing 7k jobs.

The most recent of Meta’s lay-off was witnessed during their NFT project’s wind down. In 2022, the firm merged NFTs on both Instagram and Facebook because there was an increased popularity of digital tokens.

Although the trading volume of NFT has decreased by about 90%, Meta was observed to quickly reduce their losses.

Is Zuckerberg Abandoning his Metaverse Aspiration?

Due to the letting go of workers, people have been wondering about Zuckerberg’s intentions for the metaverse.

For a couple of years, Mark Zuckerberg has been highly focused on increasing the fame of Meta, as was observed with the rebranding.

Although, at this point, it seems like Zuckerberg has moved away from his ambition. As per his recent post in relevance to the plan of the company, it was observed that the metaverse was seen less compared to the last two years.

Zuckerberg had only referred to it twice, the first time it was utilized to explain it as a way of offering an idea of presence. Secondly, to elaborate on Meta’s social connections in the future.

Meta’s Reality Labs is Likely to Face Cuts

Reality Labs is one of Meta’s metaverse components. According to research, Reality Labs has been losing money for the past few years.

Just last year the company lost around $14B and was predicted to continuously lose approximately $20B per year in the upcoming years.

The firm has always been supportive of Reality Labs whenever they have experienced losses. Although, a month ago things were witnessed differently as there was an alteration of sentiment in relevance to the top brass.

Susan Li is the latest Chief Financial Officer of the metaverse. She said that the metaverse division will go through the same process as the other components of the firm.

By this, the CFO, Susan Li, meant that Reality Labs would also be possibly facing a reduction of their budget levels.

It seems like Mark Zuckerberg’s more intrigued by artificial intelligence as compared to the metaverse now. As it has been lately observed, artificial intelligence is currently dominating the tech world.

This is especially because of ChatGPT which has received much recognition around the world in just over a couple of months. Meta has been putting in efforts to stay relevant with artificial intelligence’s worldwide fame.

Though, it seems as if they are losing because Microsoft has invested in ChatGPT’s OpenAI, and Google revealed their AI chatbot – Bard – only a month ago.

Even though there is uncertainty around the future of the metaverse, investors have been satisfied with the firm’s worker’s lay-offs. Their particularly happy about it because the firm’s stock has hit a 6-month high.

Although, the same cannot be said about Meta’s workers. Several of them have raised questions regarding the uncertainty of their jobs.