Summary: Meta is laying off approximately 8,000 employees (10% of its workforce), eliminating 6,000 open positions, and plans additional layoffs for the second half of 2026, beginning May 20. The cuts, announced in an internal memo from HR chief Janelle Gale, are more structural than performance-based, reorganizing teams”. $115 billion to $135 billion for AI infrastructure this year. The cuts come with executive stock options worth up to $921 million each, and a workplace monitoring program that pushes workers’ buttons to train AI agents.
Meta told employees on Wednesday will cut about 8,000 jobs, about 10% of its global workforce, starting May 20. The company also eliminated 6,000 open requests it planned to fill, bringing the effective job reduction to 14,000 positions. Additional cuts are planned for the second half of the year, but their timing and scope have not been finalized. If the second wave matches the first, Meta will have eliminated about 20% of its workforce before 2026. The memo announcing the layoffs was written by Meta’s head of human resources, Janelle Gale, who said the announcement came early because details had already leaked. “We are doing this as part of our ongoing efforts to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to recoup other investments we have made.“Gale wrote.”It’s not an easy trade-off, and it will mean letting go of people who have made meaningful contributions to the Meta during their time here.“
His planned investments cost 115-135 billion dollars this year alone. That’s Meta’s capital spending for 2026, a 73% increase from the $72.2 billion it spent in 2025, almost all of which went to AI infrastructure. The company is building Prometheus, a one-gigawatt artificial intelligence supercluster that will come online this year in Ohio, and a five-gigawatt $10 billion Hyperion facility on 2,250 acres in Louisiana. In June 2025, Scale hired former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang as its first chief AI officer in a deal that included a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI. it is so Poaching elite AI talent with packages worth $1.5 billion for a single engineer. Recruits are not fired people. That’s the point.
Rolling cuts
The layoffs in May are the third wave of layoffs at Meta in 2026. In January, the company cut more than 1,000 positions at Reality Labs, shuttered several VR game studios and cut about 10% of the division. In March, he cut another 700 jobs in at least five departmentsincluding Reality Labs, Facebook social, recruiting, sales and global operations. May’s round is company-wide and structural rather than performance-based, a distinction made clear in Gale’s memo. Meta reorganizes teams into an AI-focused form.shells” and the transfer of engineers within the company to the Applied AI organization. New role categories are created: “AI builder,” “AI bridge host,” and “AI organization head.” The company’s internal language describes purpose as driving “a step change in engineering productivity and product quality“through”we are fundamentally rethinking how we work.“
The cumulative payout since 2022 now exceeds 33,000 jobs. Meta cut 11,000 in November 2022, 10,000 in March 2023, 3,600 in January 2025 (framed as performance-based, although employees with positive reviews were caught in the sweepstakes), and about 9,700 in three waves in 2026. The company ended 2025 with 78,865 employees, up 6% year-over-year, and aggressively rehired after initial layoffs through 2024 and 2025.efficiency year” cuts. Now deeper than the rehiring. US workers affected by the May round will receive 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks of service each year and 18 months of health insurance.
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Compensation contrast
Just days before the March layoffs, Meta filed SEC disclosures that revealed a new stock option program that would reach a market capitalization of $9 trillion by 2031, roughly six times its current valuation. Potential payout: up to $921 million each $787 million for chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, chief product officer Chris Cox and chief operating officer Javier Olivan, and chief financial officer Susan Lee. Mark Zuckerberg is not included in the plan. The program is modeled after Tesla’s Elon Musk compensation structure and is Meta’s first such award since going public in 2012.
Opticians are hard to defend. Stock-based compensation consumed about 96% of Meta’s 2025 free cash flow of $43.6 billion. Rank-and-file employees have seen their stock compensation decline in recent years as they absorb successive periods of layoffs. The message, whether intended or not, is that the people who survive the cuts will work for less, while those who lead the cuts will earn about a billion dollars each. The $9 trillion target calls for Meta’s market capitalization to grow by about 35% annually over five years. If the target is met, the stock appreciation that drives the executive payouts will be partially funded by the reduction in labor costs caused by the layoffs.
Control question
The layoff announcement comes days after a separate announcement raised employee concerns. Meta installs software on the work computers of US employees under a program called the Model Capabilities Initiative. Captures keystrokes, mouse movements and screenshots to train AI agents. Bosworth told employees that “there is no opt-out on your work-provided laptop.” Enrollment staff reported protesting the program on internal forums. Cornell researchers have raised questions of consent and compensation regarding the use of employee behavior as AI training data.
The reciprocity is stark. Meta is asking its remaining employees to create training data that will teach the AI systems to replicate computer usage patterns, while also laying off employees whose patterns will be changed as a result of the AI. Zuckerberg is building a personal artificial intelligence agent engaging in executive information retrieval and coordination, the same type of work traditionally performed by middle management and operational roles. Internal tools called MyClaw and Second Brain are already reshaping how Meta employees interact with company systems. The trajectory is clear: more AI, fewer humans, and the remaining humans will train the AI, making the next round of humans redundant.
An industrial example
Meta’s layoffs came on the same day Microsoft announced its first voluntary retirement program in 51 years and offered to buy out about 7% of its US workforce. Oracle laid off 20,000 to 30,000 workers in March. Atlassian has laid off 1,600 people and replaced its CTO with two executives focused on artificial intelligence. The technology sector recorded more than 73,000 job cuts at 95 companies in the first four months of 2026 and is forecast to surpass the 124,201 eliminated in 2025 for the entire year. The methods are different, Oracle’s is sudden, Microsoft’s is voluntary, Meta’s is gradual, but the direction is the same: traditional roles, artificial intelligence roles, and costs saved in the former are diverted to the latter.
Meta’s Q4 2025 results, the latest available, showed revenue of $59.89 billion (up 24 percent), net income of $22.77 billion and earnings per share of $8.88, beating estimates by 8.4 percent. Full-year revenue exceeded $200 billion for the first time. For Q1 2026 results on April 29, revenue is expected to be in the range of $53.5 billion to $56.5 billion. The company isn’t cutting because it’s struggling. It’s being cut because it decided the fastest path to a $9 trillion valuation is through its AI infrastructure, not the 8,000 people it no longer needs. The question that Gale’s memo didn’t answer, and that no memo from any tech company this year has answered, is what these people should do next.
