Meta's Zuckerberg says he's 'accountable' for company's coming big layoffs
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As Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) starts to implement its plan to lay off thousands of employees Wednesday, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg told company officials that he is to blame for the issues hampering the social-media giant.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Zuckerberg "appeared downcast" in a meeting with executives as he spoke about the layoffs coming to the Facebook parent. According to the Journal, Zuckerberg said he was accountable for the missteps Meta (META) has made as it has pushed its metaverse strategy, increased spending and seen its overall advertising business shrink due to competition from TikTok and new tools from Apple (AAPL) that allow consumers to opt out of having their devices tracked across apps such as Facebook.
The layoffs are believed to be the biggest since Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook in 2004. Meta's (META) recruiting and business teams are expected to be hit especially hard by the job cuts. An official companywide announcement is set to be delivered by 6 a.m. PT on Wednesday. Meta had approximately 87,000 employees at the end of September.
The job cuts come near the end of what has been a brutal year for Meta's (META) on Wall Street. Meta's (META) stock closed Tuesday at $96.47 a share, and has fallen more than 71% this year. The shares dipped to a 52-week-low of $88.09 a share on November 4.
Meta (META) will be the latest, and biggest social-media company to join the spate of layoffs recently hitting the sector.
In late August, Snap (SNAP) was said to be in the process of cutting 20% of its employee base, and was also recently battered by Wall Street after it gave a disappointing quarterly report. And in the wake of his $44B acquisition of Twitter, Elon Musk fired approximately half of the company's 3,700 employees last week.