Tuesday morning, March 25th. Somewhere in Menlo Park, a recruiter opens Workplace and sees a message from their manager: “Can we hop on a quick call?” They already know. The recruiter had been hiring people for Reality Labs for two years. Now they’re one of roughly 700 employees across five divisions — Reality Labs, recruiting, sales, global operations, Facebook — who got cut in Meta’s second layoff round of 2026.

One day earlier, according to CNBC, Meta filed paperwork for a new stock option plan. Six executives — Andrew Bosworth, Chris Cox, Javier Olivan, Susan Li, and two others — could pocket up to $921 million each if Meta hits a $9 trillion market cap by 2031. That’s not a typo. $9 trillion. The company is worth about $1.5 trillion today.

Mark Zuckerberg didn’t get options. He already owns the company.

Let me sit with those two facts for a second. 700 people lose their income. Six people get a lottery ticket worth nearly a billion dollars each. Same week. Same press cycle. Meta’s official line, per IBTimes, is that the options are “aimed at retaining leadership talent.”

Retaining them from what, exactly?

Here’s what I find hard to swallow: CNBC’s framing. The headline was about “aggressive timing” of the stock options. Aggressive. Like it’s a bold chess move rather than a company telling 700 humans their labor is no longer worth buying while simultaneously telling six humans their loyalty is worth $921 million a head. The word “aggressive” does a lot of work in business journalism. It makes greed sound like strategy.

This is the second round of cuts this year. In January, according to Gizmodo, Reality Labs lost 10% of its staff. Now another chunk. The metaverse thing is done — or at least, Meta is done pretending it’s a priority. The money is moving to AI. Capital expenditure for 2026: between $115 billion and $135 billion, per News9, mostly for data centers and compute.

$115 billion.

I keep thinking about the recruiter. Or the person on the global operations team who maybe relocated to join Meta eighteen months ago. Some of them are being offered new roles — with another relocation required. That’s in the fine print. Move your family again or take the severance.

Meanwhile, there’s this strange detail: the $9 trillion target. For context, the most valuable company on Earth right now is Apple, sitting around $3.5 trillion. Meta is betting its executive compensation that it will be worth almost three Apples within five years. The confidence is… I don’t know what the confidence is. Either visionary or delusional, and I’m not sure anyone — including Zuckerberg — actually knows which one.

And I want to disagree with something specific here. Storyboard18 reported that this is the first time Meta has issued executive stock options since its 2012 IPO. They frame it as “Meta unveils $2.7 billion AI-linked pay plan to retain top leaders.” The word “retain” appears three times in their piece. But the assumption buried in every one of those articles is that Bosworth or Cox would actually leave if they didn’t get an extra $921 million in potential upside. Would they? Where would Andrew Bosworth go? He’s been at Meta since 2006. He’s a lifer. He built the News Feed ranking team. The idea that without nearly a billion dollars in options he’d walk out — it’s a fiction that companies tell investors. And journalists repeat it because it sounds plausible.

Nobody is leaving Meta for Anthropic or Google because they only made $50 million instead of $921 million. That’s not how human motivation works at that income level. This is a bonus. Call it what it is.

There’s a coffee shop on Willow Road, maybe a quarter mile from Meta’s main campus. I wonder if anyone who got laid off went there yesterday. The latte art is surprisingly good for a strip mall place. That detail has nothing to do with anything. But neither does framing a billion-dollar bonus as “retention” when 700 people just lost the ability to pay rent.

My Opinion

Look, I’ve watched Meta do this cycle three times now. 2022: 11,000 people. 2023: 10,000 more. Each time, the stock goes up. CNBC reported the stock climbed almost 3% on news of these layoffs. Wall Street literally rewards Meta for firing people.

And I get it — from a shareholder value perspective, headcount reduction means lower costs, higher margins, stock go up. That’s how the game works. I’m not naive.

But there’s something broken when a company spends $115 billion on GPUs in one year and can’t find budget for 700 salaries. Those 700 people — maybe 700 × $150K average? That’s $105 million. Rounding error against $115 billion. They didn’t fire them because they couldn’t afford them. They fired them because the stock goes up when you do.

The $921 million executive options are the cherry on top. Meta is telling the world: we value six people’s loyalty at $5.5 billion total, and we value 700 people’s labor at zero. Both statements released within 24 hours. If there’s a better summary of how Silicon Valley works in 2026, I haven’t seen it.

Am I saying Bosworth and Cox don’t deserve compensation? No. They probably do great work. Am I saying 700 layoffs are always wrong? Also no — companies restructure, that’s real. What I’m saying is: doing both in the same week, and expecting nobody to notice the math, is either tone-deaf or contemptuous. Pick one.

Author: Yahor Kamarou (Mark)
www.humai.blog
26 Mar 2026