Mark Zuckerberg (screenshot from Facebook)
Meta/Facebook employees are hopping mad with Mark Zuckerberg over the granting of bonuses to company executives even as tens of thousands of Facebook employees are being fired due to drops in revenue. And at the same time, Meta paid out $27.1 million in what was described as “other compensation” to Mark Zuckerberg in 2022 beyond his salary, according to a report in Entrepreneur.com. This extra compensation reportedly included security costs for the Facebook founder and the use of a private plane among other things.
One angry employee confronted Mark Zuckerberg during a company “town hall” meeting last week asking, “Why did the entire executive team get EE/GE ratings when they are also directly responsible for the choices that led to us needing to lay off 20+% of the company? Where is the accountability?” (At Facebook an EE rating means “exceeds expectations and GE means “greatly exceeds.”
It was only a month ago that Mark Zuckerberg told Meta/Facebook employees that the company planned to lay off another 10,000 employees. That news came after the company let go of more than 11,000 people at the end of last year. Meta is suffering along with everyone else from the worldwide financial crisis, with its stock plummeting in 2022; however, as its business model depends almost entirely on advertising – as opposed to selling a physical product – the company is more susceptible to drops in income during times of recession.
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But somehow there is still plenty of money for executive bonuses. Most normal people would probably not understand why a company’s senior staff is deserving of bonuses if things are so bad that more than 20,000 people are losing their jobs. And normal people would also wonder where all the money for the bonuses came from in the first place if there was no money for all the thousands fired. Maybe at least a few hundred, if not a few thousands, Meta/Facebook workers could have been kept on for another year for the cost of the bonus money.
And Mark Zuckerberg could not even promise that this will be the end of the layoffs telling Meta employees, “I generally feel good about the position here, but just given the volatility, I don’t want to kind of promise that there won’t be future things in the future.”
“What I can say is,” added Mark Zuckerber, “that there’s nothing that we’re planning now, and if we do something, it’ll be sort of on that time frame.”
