Morale is so bad at Mark Zuckerberg's Meta even the company's own CTO admits it's 'probably the worst it's ever been'

But what’s truly notable here is how candid Bosworth is here, considering he’s one of Mark Zuckerberg’s longest-serving lieutenants. The timing is also interesting: Just a few weeks ago, Meta posted one of the richest quarters in its history: $56.31 billion in revenue and roughly $26.8 billion in profit for the first three months of 2026, with sales up 33% year over year — the company’s fastest growth since 2021. So, it’s not like the money isn’t pouring in. But the mood, at least based on reports coming out of the company, is not matching the company’s monetary successes.

Meta did not respond to Moneywise’s requests for comment.

Morale @ Meta: Layoffs, surveillance and shrinking pay

The discontent has been building for months. As Moneywise previously reported, Meta cut about 8,000 jobs in May — roughly 10% of its global workforce — and reassigned another 10% of staff to a mandatory AI task force that some employees compared to being “drafted.” Much of that work, which amounts to labeling data to train Meta’s models, landed inside a new Applied AI division created in March. One worker called that unit “literally a gulag” in interviews with Wired.

Bosworth hasn’t disputed the frustration. In a memo to staff first reported by Wired’s Lauren Goode, he conceded that leadership had done “an atrocious job explaining the vision” behind the reorganization and admitted the company had undermined employees’ faith that their expertise would be valued. The fixes so far: reassigned workers can reapply for other roles, managers will be capped at roughly 20 direct reports, and — in a detail that drew consternation online — Meta is boosting budgets for travel, events and office snacks.

There’s more feeding the unease. In February, Meta trimmed the stock portion of annual raises by 5%, on top of a 10% cut the year before. Median total compensation slid from $417,400 in 2024 to $388,200 last year, according to Wired. Since April, the company has also run software on U.S. employees’ laptops that logs keystrokes, clicks and periodic screenshots to train AI agents, with no opt-out, though European staff are exempt under the EU’s privacy rules. Workers responded by handing out flyers branding Meta an “Employee Data Extraction Factory” and circulating a petition. One Instagram employee told Wired: “everyone is unhappy; the only people who are not unhappy are, literally, executives.”

How Silicon Valley’s AI spending spree is fueling layoffs

To be clear, Meta isn’t making these cuts because it’s hurting financially. Remember, several paragraphs ago I noted how Meta just recorded one of its most profitable quarters in history. These moves are all about funding its AI ambitions. The company expects to spend $125 billion to $145 billion this year on capital expenditures — for data centers, servers and chips that power AI — nearly double the $72.2 billion it spent in 2025. CFO Susan Li framed the layoffs as a way to run a “leaner operating model“ that helps offset that eye-watering AI bill.

We’re seeing executives across Silicon Valley making similar trade-offs. Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta together plan to spend roughly $725 billion on capital projects in 2026, most of it on AI infrastructure — a 77% jump from the year before. At the same time, the sector is shedding workers at a clip not seen since the post-pandemic correction. More than 118,000 tech employees have lost their jobs in 2026, per tracker Layoffs.fyi, with Amazon and Microsoft eliminating tens of thousands of roles.

While many tech execs are carrying out layoffs to build around new AI-powered efficiencies, not everyone is buying the explanation. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, whose chips are literally powering the AI boom, previously dismissed the AI-layoffs narrative as “lazy,” telling executives who shrink their workforces in AI’s name that they’re simply “out of imagination.”

For what it’s worth, Meta was doing mass layoffs way before it was fashionable. Zuckerberg declared 2023 the “Year of Efficiency” and cut some 21,000 jobs across two waves. What’s different about the current environment is that Meta is making these moves from a dominant position, rather than doing it to reverse the company’s fortunes. (At the time, though, Zuckerberg was really into the metaverse; now, it’s all AI all the time.)

To his credit, Bosworth says he wants to turn the mood around at Meta. In a memo sent to staff on Monday, he said Meta needs to “be the best place for the best people to do their best work” — and to “rekindle the best of the culture” that drew its employees in the first place.