When Meta’s CEO announced 11,000 layoffs in 2022, a red-eyed Mark Zuckerberg was conciliatory: “It was one of the hardest calls that I’ve had to make in the 18 years of running the company,” he said at the time.
Including this first mass layoff, the company has dismissed a total of around 25,000 people across several divisions since 2022, with the most recent round involving a reported 700 layoffs affecting its Reality Labs unit this week. Following the 11,000 laid off in 2022, Meta cut another 10,000 jobs and began a hiring freeze during Zuckerberg’s “year of efficiency” in 2023.
At the same time, he has changed his tone, and experts say his inconsistent behavior is hurting employees still at the company.
By early 2025, when he announced a 5% reduction in Meta’s workforce affecting approximately 3,600 workers, Zuckerberg replaced empathy with cold business logic, saying in an internal memo the cuts were aimed at “low performers” and that he had raised the bar on “performance management.”
“This is going to be an intense year, and I want to make sure we have the best people on our teams,” he said at the time.
Many of these supposed low-performing workers later argued in posts on social media they were never warned about any performance issues before being fired.
Meta cut about 600 employees across its Superintelligence Labs division late last year and cut another estimated 1,000 employees from Reality Labs earlier this year.
Inconsistent leadership
While Zuckerberg has not commented on the latest 700 layoffs reported this week, there is a clear vibe shift in his approach to layoffs since 2022, Stevens Institute of Technology business professor Haoying Xu told Fortune.
“At the very beginning, layoffs were something that he had to do—he had no choice,” he said. “Now, it seems to be a norm.”
This inconsistent leadership, as Xu describes it, may increase quiet quitting among the workers who remain and cause them to lose faith in Zuckerberg’s decision-making.
Because he went all in on the metaverse by changing his company’s name to Meta in 2021 and pouring billions into the VR and metaverse-focused Reality Labs division, employees may think twice about buying into the CEO’s grand ideas the next time.
“You will lose credibility [among] your followers, because what you did and what you said—it’s just unpredictable and untrustworthy to the employees, because you keep switching back and forth,” Xu said.
Meta did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
To be sure, the layoffs could also be seen as demonstrating Zuckerberg’s willingness to course correct on the metaverse, even though the initiative was his idea, said Jessica Kriegel, chief strategy officer at consulting firm Culture Partners, which advises companies on strategy and workforce shifts.
“He made a massive bet on the future with metaverse. He staffed up for it. He was unapologetic about it,” she told Fortune. “And then when the results didn’t match the pace, or the market shifted, didn’t slowly unwind it—he just reset the system pretty quickly.”
A lot of founders would not have done the same, Kriegel noted.
“Founder-led ideas sometimes die way too slow of a death,” she said.
Breaking the ‘psychological contract’
While Zuckerberg arguably kicked off the trend in layoffs and flat management structures in the tech industry with his “year of efficiency” declaration in 2023, his change in tone regarding layoffs is a reflection of a broad shift across tech companies, especially as AI continues to change how they operate.
Xu argued tech companies have broken the “psychological contract” they once had with workers during the pre-pandemic era where giant workforces were the norm and companies like Meta, Google, and others offered perks like free haircuts and nap pods.
In the age of AI, companies are instead scrambling to be more efficient and squeeze the most out of each worker, all while raising growth expectations. Meta, for its part, is aiming for a $9 trillion market cap by 2031, up more than 500% from $1.39 trillion today, and has promised some of its top executives payouts of up to hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve it, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Meanwhile, its new applied AI engineering team is reportedly employing a 50:1 employee-to-manager ratio, which is higher than the 12.1 employees per manager that was the average in 2025, according to Gallup.
If these tech companies can’t promise workers job security, said Xu, employees will demand other benefits, for example, more flexibility in terms of remote work or schedules as well as occupational training. The training is especially important, he added, because it may increase the odds of a worker getting a job later on even if their current employer lays them off.
As for Meta, Kriegel said Zuckerberg needs to bring some semblance of normalcy back to the company to reassure workers following layoffs. The best approach, she said, is to be candid about the business reasons behind them and not overexplain. Employees need to be able to buy into the company’s vision to move forward.
“Consistency matters more than inspiration at that point,” she said. “Employees don’t necessarily need a bold vision speech. They need to see the same priorities being reinforced over and over again in decisions and investments and even what’s getting rewarded internally.”
