Mark Zuckerberg: 11,000+ laid off from Meta, night after midterm elections

Mark Zuckerberg has announced mass layoffs at Meta aka Facebook, with 11,000 jobs sliced away -- a significant number, considering the largest social networking site in the world had 87,314 employees at its peak earlier this year.

Meta has been bleeding on the stock market for a while now, and while the headlines are dominated by Twitter and Elon Musk, it seems no one really cares about the bigger issue: the largest social networking site in the world (which owns Instagram, Oculus, WhatsApp, and more) has just laid off 11,000+ people right before Christmas. Oh, and within hours of the 2022 midterm elections.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained: "Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I'd expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that".

But don't worry about the Metaverse, that area is safe of course... but Zuckerberg did say that Facebook (at the time, now Meta) had "overinvested" at the start of the pandemic, where it hedged bets that people would use their social networking site more... but they didn't.

Maybe Zuckerberg could remember the massive Cambridge Analytica scandal from 2018, where back in 2004 the then 19-year-old was talking to a friend in his college dorm room at Harvard when he said that people are "dumb fucks" for trusting him. Maybe, just maybe, there are some far bigger issues at hand here.

Meta shares are down over 50% in the last six months alone, and down an even more punishing 71% in the last 12 months.