Zuckerberg Tanks Both Morale and Profit for Meta by Being a Beta

Frederic Legrand - COMEO / shutterstock.com
Frederic Legrand - COMEO / shutterstock.com

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes that the company is only facing “a challenging period” according to his memo about the future of Meta in the upcoming months as they cut 10,000 jobs. Pulling out his trust magnifying glass, the still reigning but consistently withering king of social media is zeroing in so he can streamline the company “by removing multiple layers of management.”

“This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” he emphasized in the memo. Factoring in the 11,000 employees he sacked back in November, the company will have trimmed roughly 24,000 people or just under one-quarter of its total workforce in roughly six months. This kind of reduction coming in two distinct waves signifies something big at Meta.

Many analysts consider Meta to be swimming upstream at this point. Despite their inclusion of reels and stories on both Facebook and Instagram, their popularity was little-lived. Instead, people are flocking to TikTok in droves. The third leg of the company, WhatsApp, has shown little in the way of innovation and isn’t generating the interest it once did.

Then, there are external factors like the new privacy policy from Apple that makes the data gathering of Meta’s apps nearly useless. Artificial intelligence and bot profiles are forcing people away from the apps as they are tired of dealing with the manipulation and marketing being thrust into their faces 24/7. Then the TikTok surge is killing their numbers. The days of mindlessly scrolling the IG feed before bed have now taken a backseat to short-form videos that do what Vine never could and make monetization easy.

A former tech CEO spoke to CNN Business under the request of anonymity and spoke up about the problems with Meta, Amazon, Twitter, and even Google concerning the practice of hiring “stupid amounts of people” to work on “science projects,” especially at Meta. “You just wonder what are these 100,000-some people doing? The app doesn’t change much. These companies become hugely profitable, and the CEOs think that there are all these other areas they can expand into as part of their world domination plan. And then the economy takes a turn, and everyone starts to care about profitability and growth.”

While a powerful insight by that CEO, he is missing something crucial to the entire concept of Meta. It used to be Meta was a place to rebel. Facebook was the answer to MySpace and the “friend” you could never delete. Instagram initially provided a photo-only application to share moments of your world and have a voice in a crowded room. A place to put on art shows inside the gallery of the world if you will.

By turning his back on that idea and bowing to the leftist appeal of being another tool to manipulate the population just like the mainstream media does, the man became a full-blown beta. This lack of backbone and conviction sent the nation and the company on a downward spiral. It happened with AOL, and they burned out almost as quickly as they showed up.

Should Zuckerberg want to get the company to show the profitability and growth it is capable of, it’s not just a trimming of the employees he needs to worry about. He needs to worry about trimming away the people who aren’t willing to disagree with him. Historically he has shown that he will “eliminate” anyone who goes against him. This is true for Meta just as it was when he wanted to build his Hawaii estate.

Bringing in people who will challenge his “authority” and “expertise” should be his primary focus going forward. This is an industry born of innovation. It used to reward creators who were innovative by promoting them to others and eventually monetizing them. Now it punishes them in favor of paid-for clicks. If we wanted to relax with a buffet of ads we could just go back to reading People and National Geographic.