How Many People Can Facebook Fire?

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
How Many People Can Facebook Fire?

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Facebook parent Meta Platforms fired 13% of its staff last year. That was 11,000 people. The Wall Street Journal says this will happen again. How many can Meta fire before it cuts into its ability to run all its businesses?

At its peak, Meta had nearly 90,000 people. It has several divisions. This includes enterprise businesses, a virtual reality operation, and work efficiency software. One would assume it will not cut many workers in its large social media divisions. These include successful Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. If it does cut in these areas, the jobs will likely be administrative and not engineering. However, this may not be true if it closes down some of these social media products.

Oddly, Meta’s cuts resemble GM’s, one of the old world economy’s largest companies. GM will offer buyouts to 58,000 white-collar workers. This decimates the workforce but appears to keep production facilities largely intact. Once again, the administrators take the brunt, Perhaps if the entire US economy is over-staffed, it is overstaffed by paper pushers.

What is not clear to outsiders is what Meta is willing to abandon beyond people who are traffic cops more than they are producers of products or services.

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Across the entire industry, many other mega-tech companies have new practices, Facebook has tuned to tactics used in the 1950s. Despite billions of dollars in their accounts and founders that will be billionaires their entire lives, tech is saying it has a paucity of ideas. They cannot keep current headcount levels because the intellection cupboard is bare.

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The cupboard is bare, and it says frightening things about the future of American innovation.

These are the 25 brands customers are abandoning.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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