Shareholders slam Zuckerberg's 'terrifying' $100b+ Metaverse experiment

In a sternly-worded letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Meta stockholders have urged the mega-corporation to "get fit and focused" by cutting 20 percent of staff and shaving $5 billion off annual capital expenses and metaverse investments. Brad Gerstner, founder and boss of Altimeter Capital, penned the letter on behalf of his firm …

[Paul Crawford]

Altimeter said it still has faith in the Meta team, and believes the social network – which is used by 1.6 billion people a day and banks about $40 billion a year in profit

Really, they use 1.6 billion people. OK probably 10% of that are on there a lot...

[Kev18999]

Just the elites looking to push for layoffs and kill the work from home practice.

[karlkarl]

I'm sure he is going to walk away blaming VR and saying the public aren't ready for it. We will then have to wait another 20 years for it to appear again.

The public is not ready for locked down crippled monetized VR. We just want the damn headsets and open drivers.

Keep the rest of your metaverse shite.

[A Non e-mouse]

85,000 staff.

$10 billion a year in "investment"

WTF are Facebook meta getting for all that money & headcount?

[CapeCarl]

"Corporate name optimization"

"Facebook" = 8 characters.

"Meta" = 4 characters.

2x the speed at which users can type the name of said company and only half the storage in RAM.

(recovering asm/C programmer)

[David 132]

Re: "Corporate name optimization"

Well so you say, and it seems like a handy optimization now, being able to store the company name in half as many bytes, but we'll have cause to regret it in about 50 years' time...

(recovering Y2K engineer)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Corporate name optimization"

... we gonna party like it's 1999 ...

[eldakka]

Re: "Corporate name optimization"

> "Meta" = 4 characters.

Are you saying Meta is a 4-letter word?

Meta this.

I've had a Meta of a day.

What the Meta was that?

Meta you and the horse you rode in on.

[Smeagolberg]

Re: "Corporate name optimization"

>"Facebook" = 8 characters.

>"Meta" = 4 characters.

"Me" = 2 characters.

Soon all that will be left of him is "Me".

A very sad, lonely Me.

[Strahd Ivarius]

Re: "Corporate name optimization"

and then it will be just M

[Joe W]

Yeah, right.

"This decline in share price mirrors the lost confidence in the company, not just the bad mood of the market."

Nearly spilled by G&T. Confidence. Yeah. Right.

[Ian Johnston]

In the last four years, the number of employees at Meta has increased by more than a factor of three, Altimeter said, from 25,000 to 85,000.

Bloody hell. What do they all do? That's 3.7 times as many employees as the BBC.

[Tomato42]

It takes a lot of people to Make Mark Happy...

Shame he's still missing his emotion chip... those darn IC shortages!

[Robert Grant]

> That's 3.7 times as many employees as the BBC.

That makes it sound much more reasonable.

[Anonymous Coward]

How else did you think Zucks Metaverse would have any users other than him?

[Pascal Monett]

"a 0.1 percent stake"

And that is exactly how much your opinion is worth to El Zuck.

[CommonBloke]

Re: "a 0.1 percent stake"

I imagine one of zuck's robot clones will come up to that company and say "Your <company> stake does not amount to USD 1 billion. Master has bought your shares back."

[BOFH in Training]

Re: "a 0.1 percent stake"

Even if he manages to get a 51% stake, he still can't do anything as Zuck has a different class of stock which has alot more voting power.

https://www.morningstar.com/articles/1061237/how-facebook-silences-its-investors

As long as Zuck doesn't really sell his stocks, he can't really be outvoted in anything related to Meta, unless he agrees with it.

[andrewj]

Regardless of what you think of Meta (and I don't think highly) all this smacks of is short-sighted investor greed. They present no alternative vision other than to milk the cash cow.

[David Hicklin]

> short-sighted investor greed

That is the normal operating model of all these investors - usually measured in uSeconds on a computer algorithm

[Anonymous Coward]

Eff Meta, Eff Zuck and the pig they rode in on

Social vandalism

Let it burn to the ground.

.

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Important expenditures

Gotta buy this mansion and spend all my time scanning it into the Metaverse. You won't even notice it in that budget.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Asylum at Charenton

also had a Walled Garden, to keep the inmates from escaping.

[deadlockvictim]

Bankruptcy

I'm all on for Mark Zuckerberg's grand experiment to bankrupt his companies.

The only thing is, what will replace them?

[Jimmy2Cows]

Re: what will replace them?

Please let it be nothing.

[Strahd Ivarius]

Re: Bankruptcy

E.M.?

[Potemkine!]

run even better and more efficiently without the layers and lethargy that comes with this extreme rate of employee expansion."

For shareholders, employees are the enemies. Getting rid of them should raise dividends and it's all that matters.

== Bring us Dabbdy back! ==

[Barrie Shepherd]

Carry on Zac

Zac should continue to develop and invest billions in Meta.

With a bit of luck he will eventually bankrupt the company, Meta/Facebook will be bankrupt and will be wound up and the world can return to normality.

[Sceptic Tank]

world can return to normality.

It will be replaced with something even more bizarre and evil.

[Anonymous Coward]

no more than $5 billion a year.

(Gerstner) "... urged Meta to cut its spending on the metaverse by half to no more than $5 billion a year. "

Whaaaaat ??? Is he insane or what ? How will we get avatars with an actual body in Second Life^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Metaverse with such ridiculously low investments ?

[imanidiot]

Facebook is dying

No investor plan is going to change the fact that Facebook was Millenial cool. Now that Millenials are seen as the new Boomers by Gen Z youfs Facebook/Meta is facing a long slow slide into irrelevance as people move on to other platforms (or abandon "social" media altogether as many are starting to realise it's detrimental effects)

[Dave_A]

Re: Facebook is dying

Nah, they are just moving to purely-video social media, as actually composing and reading text is apparently too hard....

[Dave_A]

Zuck has the right idea, 50 years too early

The up-and-down-of-it is that Zuck realizes that whoever invents the 'Oasis' of Ready Player One fame will be the richest man on the planet.

The problem is, the tech just isn't there to do 'that' yet, and thus he's not going to be 'that guy' starting this early & with the amount of effort he is applying - as he'll run out of resources before the hardware is 'there' to actually do it.

The idea of putting on present-day VR gear to socialize politely (and nothing more - remember: the RPO metaverse allowed virtual violence, competition, vehicles, etc) with cartoon avatars just makes no sense...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Zuck has the right idea, 50 years too early

Ready Play One never made any sense with the tech level suggested.

Direct neural shunt is the only way... and that's going have all sorts of other issues.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Zuck has the right idea, 50 years too early

and to put the shunt in place, you first cut the head, of course...