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.

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.

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