Meta will soon cut 5 percent of its workforce, focusing on what the social media conglomerate calls the “lowest performers” on its staff, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday as the company’s latest restructuring decision in recent days.
The new round of layoffs will eliminate about 3,600 workers out of 72,000 total employees, according to Meta’s quarterly earnings report. Those workers whose jobs are expected to be cut will be replaced by new talent this year.
“I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster,” Zuckerberg said in an internal employee memo first reported by Bloomberg. “We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle.”
Zuckerberg’s move mirrors the layoffs that Elon Musk made when he took over Twitter and later renamed it X, albeit Meta’s job cuts aren’t as drastic. Musk laid off more than 6,000 workers, or nearly 80 percent of the company’s workforce, after he acquired the platform in October 2022. X now has around 2,840 employees.
Meta previously laid off 10,000 employees in March 2023 and 11,000 workers in November 2022, reducing its workforce by about 25 percent.
The announcement comes as Meta makes numerous company-wide shifts in preparation for President-elect Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House next week.
On Friday, Meta terminated its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and supplier diversity programs to root out corporate wokeness. Last week, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would return to promoting free speech by replacing its third-party fact-checking program with user-generated community notes that Musk’s X pioneered, among other changes in its content moderation policies.
The company also changed its “hateful conduct” policy, previously referred to as hate speech, that allows users to call those in the LGBTQ+ community “mentally ill” or “abnormal” and enables the comparison of women to “household objects.”
The changes affect the technology company’s three main platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
In the past two weeks, Meta has appointed several new leaders. Joel Kaplan, a prominent Republican who has opposed restrictions on political speech from within the company, was named the new head of Meta’s global policy team. Moreover, UFC CEO Dana White was one of the three new board directors who will help lead the company toward advancing the future of social media.
With the newly reported layoffs, Zuckerberg is bracing for an “intense year” ahead as he focuses on efficiency and moves away from the partisan politics that led to widespread censorship on Facebook during the Biden administration.
In his appearance Friday on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the tech executive revealed he had been thinking about these company-wide shifts “for a long time” and decided to initiate the changes after Trump’s resounding electoral victory in November, noting he would have been criticized anyway regardless of the timing.
He also said most companies need more “masculine energy.”
“It’s like, you want feminine energy, you want masculine energy,” Zuckerberg told Rogan in the nearly three-hour conversation. “I think that that’s all good. But I do think the corporate culture sort of had swung toward being this somewhat more neutered thing.”
As Trump takes office on January 20, Zuckerberg will attend the inauguration alongside Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, according to NBC News. Zuckerberg has donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund and pledges to work with the incoming president.
The Meta chief executive will also co-host a black-tie reception with billionaire Republican donors to celebrate Trump’s return to the White House hours after the inauguration, the Associated Press reported. The reception will take place shortly before the inaugural balls.