Big Tech Layoffs Deflate Musk and Zuckerberg
Twitter and Facebook can’t afford their billionaire bosses’ obsessions in a new age of austerity.
There are no superheroes.
Photographer: Noam Galai/Getty Images
Restructuring is a horrible time for the staff of any company, but it’s also an opportunity to concentrate on what reliably makes money. Elon Musk has made cuts so deep at Twitter Inc. that his team has started asking dozens of workers to return after being laid off last Friday, when about half of them were shown the door. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms Inc. is, meanwhile, gearing up to fire thousands of its roughly 87,000 salaried employees on Wednesday, according to the Wall Street Journal, the first time in its history that it has ever carried out mass job cuts.
Inflation, fears of recession and a pandemic hiring boom have led to this inflection point for Big Tech, with firms like Stripe Inc. making painful job cuts too. But the cuts at Meta and Twitter are more than an opportunity to bolster their bottom line; it’s a moment to put aside their leaders’ obsessions with new and untested services.