Meta mulls 20% slash as threads rockets past x
Meta’s hallways are once again echoing with whispers of layoffs—up to 15,800 roles, or one in five employees—while its Twitter-killer Threads just became the fastest consumer app in history to 450 million users.
The timing is brutal. Internal memos viewed by senior staff ask each division to model life without a fifth of its headcount, according to people familiar with the discussions. The company’s public line dismisses the figure as “speculative,” yet inside Menzio Park the exercise feels real: spreadsheets are open, project codes are tagged “sunset,” and managers have been told to prepare contingency budgets by early summer.
The math is cold
A 20% cut from the 79,000 workers on file at the end of 2025 would eclipse the 11,000 laid off in the first wave of Zuckerberg’s 2022 “year of efficiency.” Back then the CEO framed downsizing as a detox after a pandemic hiring binge. This time the narrative is murkier. Meta is simultaneously writing checks it has never written before: $600 billion through 2028 for AI data centers and golden-handcuffs packages aimed at luring top-tier researchers into a new “super-intelligence” team.
Investors noticed. The stock dropped 3.8% Friday, shaving $24 billion off the market cap in a single session. After-hours traders nudged it down another half point, a rare wobble for a equity story that has climbed 160% in twelve months.
Threads eats x for breakfast
While HR teams brace for pink slips, the product floor is popping champagne. Threads hit 100 million sign-ups in five days last winter and now clocks 141.5 million daily actives on mobile—15 million more than X. The network grew 18% in January alone, mostly at the expense of Elon Musk’s bird, whose own DAU has flat-lined at 125 million.
Zuckerberg has never hidden the strategy: let X bleed by being the less toxic town square, then monetize once attention stabilizes. With ad rates finally rebounding, that moment may arrive just as Meta slashes payroll. Translation: fewer humans, more algorithmic feed, fatter margins.
The company that once rebranded itself to chase a metaverse no one asked for is now betting the farm on large-language-model hallucinations and a text app that looks like 2010 Twitter. Employees left standing will have to code the future with skeleton crews. The irony? The fastest-growing product in Meta’s stable needs almost no moderation because the competition already did the hard work of driving users away.
Wall Street will cheer if costs drop faster than revenue. Users will stay as long as the timeline loads. And 15,800 soon-to-be ex-staffers will refresh their inboxes, waiting for the subject line that starts with “Your role has been impacted.”