Business rivalry seemingly isn’t enough for two of the tech industry’s most powerful billionaires. Now Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg say they want to settle their scores in a cage fight.
Twitter owner and Tesla
(TSLA) CEO Musk recently tweeted that he would be “up for a cage fight” with Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta. In an Instagram story Wednesday, Zuckerberg fired back by posting a screenshot of Musk’s tweet overlaid with the caption: “Send Me Location.”
Musk then responded to a tweet about the fight by Alex Heath, editor of tech news website Verge, with “Vegas Octagon” — a reference to the Las Vegas arena that hosts the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
“I have this great move that I call ‘The Walrus,’ where I just lie on top of my opponent & do nothing,” he added in a separate tweet.
CNN has contacted Meta for comment. A spokesperson for the company told Verge: “The [Instagram] story speaks for itself.”
It remains unclear whether Zuckerberg and Musk are serious or having a laugh.
Quite who would win in a cage fight, however, remains to be seen. Musk is physically bigger than Zuckerberg, but the Meta chief practices jiu-jitsu, the Brazilian martial art, and won gold and silver in a tournament in May.
Oddspedia, a sports betting platform, collated odds from several different bookmakers, including Bovada, Bet Online and Ladbrokes, and concluded that Zuckerberg has an 83% chance of winning the fight.
Meanwhile, bookmaker Paddy Power is betting the match never happens, but that if it does, both men have an equal chance of winning.
“If this fight does actually go ahead, with a bit of luck, they’ll both knock some sense into each other,” a spokesperson for the Irish company said in a statement.
The two — who in the past jostled for a high spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index before Musk became the world’s richest man — have clashed before.
In 2017, they engaged in a very public feud over the future of artificial intelligence.
Musk had repeatedly warned about the dangers of AI, describing it as a potentially existential threat to the human race. Zuckerberg, on the other hand, took a much more optimistic view.
During a Facebook Live broadcast at the time he dismissed “naysayers” who sketched out “doomsday scenarios” as being “pretty irresponsible.”
Musk shot back shortly afterward, tweeting: “I’ve talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is pretty limited.”
Musk knocked Zuckerberg from the number three spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in 2020, before becoming the richest person in the world soon after that.
He was briefly ousted from the top spot in December by Bernard Arnault, the chairman of French luxury goods giant LVMH
(LVMHF), before reclaiming his title in May. Zuckerberg is now in the 10th position.
In a matchup that no one asked for but nearly everyone would likely watch, Elon Musk could face off against Mark Zuckerberg in a cage fight.
Twitter/Tesla/SpaceX boss Musk earlier this week mocked Zuckerberg’s Meta over reports that its Instagram platform would soon have a feature called Threads to compete with Twitter.
“I’m sure Earth can’t wait to be exclusively under Zuck’s thumb with no other options,” Musk wrote on Twitter, leading to this exchange with a user referencing Zuckerberg’s recent martial arts experience:
Zuckerberg posted a screenshot of Musk’s tweet in his Instagram story along with three words: “Send me location.”
Both billionaires have at least some experience in martial arts. Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that he began studying mixed martial arts during the pandemic, saying he liked its “primal” nature.
In 2020, Musk publicly challenged Johnny Depp to a cage fight during the actor’s legal battle with actor/ex-wife Amber Heard. One of the actor’s many text messages read in court was a threat to cut off Musk’s penis amid reports he was having an affair with Heard.
Musk denied seeing Heard when she was married to Depp.
“If Johnny wants a cage fight, just let me know,” he told the New York Times, which noted that he giggled as he said it.
Musk on Twitter said a fight with Zuckerberg would be “hilarious” and added:
I have this great move that I call “The Walrus”, where I just lie on top of my opponent & do nothing
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Meta Platforms, in July 2021.
Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants his workforce to know the company is in the middle of the artificial intelligence race.
During a meeting with employees Thursday in the Hacker Square pavilion at Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters, Zuckerberg discussed Meta’s AI efforts, a spokesperson confirmed. It was the first event held there since before the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Zuckerberg addressed Meta’s recent layoffs at the beginning of the gathering but focused mostly on the company’s projects in the burgeoning field of generative AI, which uses written prompts to create conversational text and compelling visuals.
“In the last year, we’ve seen some really incredible breakthroughs — qualitative breakthroughs — on generative AI and that gives us the opportunity to now go take that technology, push it forward, and build it into every single one of our products,” Zuckerberg said, according to a statement shared with CNBC. “We’re going to play an important and unique role in the industry in bringing these capabilities to billions of people in new ways that other people aren’t going to do.”
Axios first reported on the meeting and the AI projects Meta is pursuing.
While Meta has long touted its investments in AI, the company hasn’t been at the center of the conversation regarding the latest consumer applications, which have come from Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Google and Microsoft itself.
At the meeting Thursday, Zuckerberg and other Meta executives detailed some of the company’s work incorporating generative AI models into the metaverse, the nascent virtual world Meta is sinking billions of dollars into every quarter to try and make a reality. In particular, they talked about how AI can help create the 3D visuals for the metaverse.
Meta said it’s giving employees access to several internal generative AI tools to help develop prototypes, and the company is hosting a hackathon for workers to show off their AI projects.
The company also plans to debut a service for Instagram users that will let them modify photos via text prompts and share them in the app’s Stories feature.
Additionally, Meta plans for its Messenger and WhatsApp services to eventually include the ability for users to engage with more sophisticated AI-powered chatbots as a form of entertainment.
Meta executives told employees the company is still committed to releasing AI research to the open-source community. However, they didn’t address a recent letter from Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-CT, and Josh Hawley, R-MO, expressing concern over a public leak of the company’s LLaMA language model and the “the potential for its misuse in spam, fraud, malware, privacy violations, harassment and other wrongdoing and harms.”
Last week, Meta told employees they will need to work at the company’s offices three days a week, starting in September. Amazon and Google have also altered their previous work-from-home policies in recent months.
The logo of the spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel is shown on the display of a smartphone.
Thomas Trutschel | Photothek | Getty Images
French business planning software startup Pigment has raised $88 million in a funding round led by ICONIQ, the private investment fund that manages the money of tech billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey.
Pigment is best known for its business planning and forecasting platform that’s designed to be more user-friendly than Microsoft’s spreadsheet software Excel.
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The company, co-founded and helmed by dual CEOs Eleonore Crespo and Romain Niccoli, told CNBC it planned to use the funding to expand its reach in the U.S. and artificial intelligence.
Venture capital firms Felix Capital, Meritech, IVP, and FirstMark also participated in the funding round.
Pigment counts the likes of Klarna, Miro and Tommy Hilfiger owner PVH as its customers.
The company’s tools are mainly used by finance teams to plan and make financial and business decisions. As well as Microsoft, Pigment also views enterprise software tools from giants like Google, SAP and Oracle as rivals.
Crespo said that, in 2022, Pigment grew its revenues by 600% and its total user base increased tenfold — and insisted it was well positioned to compete with behemoth incumbent Microsoft.
“We not only have users in the finance team but outside of finance, and that’s super interesting for investors to hear that we are not a finance platform but a business database that can serve any business leader out there from HR to sales to marketing, to R&D [research and development],” she said.
“We are here to sell [to] any business leader. And not only that, but they have heard from their portfolio companies that we managed to serve the most forward-looking companies out there.”
Pigment also plans to use the latest influx of money to invest in the development of AI products.
It introduced a new service called Pigment AI last month, on the heels of heightened buzz surrounding AI and products like ChatGPT, which lets clients query data, identify patterns and automate analysis and reporting.
Crespo said there are no plans to increase headcount substantially and Pigment was instead looking to grow in a more sustainable way, given the pressure from investors on businesses to achieve profitability in favor of breakneck growth.
EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton wants Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to explain and take “immediate” action over a recently exposed large pedophile network on Instagram.
Instagram has been letting a vast network of accounts promoting and purchasing child sexual abuse material flourish on its platform, according to investigations by the Wall Street Journal and researchers released on June 7. The social media platform lets users search for explicit hashtags, and has offenders exploit its recommendation algorithms to promote illicit content.
“Meta’s voluntary code on child protection seems not to work,” Breton wrote Thursday on Twitter. “Mark Zuckerberg must now explain & take immediate action.”
Breton said he will discuss the issue with Zuckerberg at the Meta headquarters on June 23 during a trip to the U.S. The politician will travel later this month to see how social media companies including Twitter are preparing to comply with the EU’s flagship content moderation law, the Digital Services Act (DSA).
He said Meta will have to “demonstrate measures” to the European Commission after August 25 when the DSA starts applying to Big Tech platforms. Otherwise, the company could face sweeping fines of up to 6 percent of its global annual revenue. Under the DSA, platforms have to crack down on illegal content and ensure children are safe on a platform. Companies have to also assess and limit how their platforms and algorithms are contributing to major societal problems such as the dissemination of illegal content and the protection of minors.
A Meta spokesperson said the company has set up an internal task force to investigate and “immediately address” the recent findings from the Wall Street Journal and researchers.
The company works “aggressively to fight” child exploitation and support law enforcement track down criminals, the spokesperson said. Meta dismantled 27 “abusive networks” between 2020 and 2022 and disabled over 490,000 accounts for violating our child safety policies in January 2023, they added.
Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks during the company’s event at Mobile World Congress Americas in Los Angeles, California, U.S., on Monday, Oct. 21, 2019.
Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Forget about the debt ceiling. Tech investors are in buy mode.
The Nasdaq Composite closed out its fifth-straight weekly gain on Friday, jumping 2.5% in the past five days, and is now up 24% this year, far outpacing the other major U.S. indexes. The S&P 500 is up 9.5% for the year and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down slightly.
Excitement surrounding chipmaker Nvidia’s blowout earnings report and its leadership position in artificial intelligence technology drove this week’s rally, but investors also snapped up shares of Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet, each of which have their own AI story to tell.
And with optimism brewing that lawmakers are close to a deal to raise the debt ceiling, and that the Federal Reserve may be slowing its pace of interest rate hikes, this year’s stock market is starting to look less like 2022 and more like the tech-happy decade that preceded it.
“Being concentrated in these mega-cap tech stocks has been where to be in this market,” said Victoria Greene, chief investment officer of G Squared Private Wealth, in an interview on CNBC’s “Worldwide Exchange” Friday morning. “You cannot deny the potential in AI, you cannot deny the earnings prowess that these companies have.”
To start the year, the main theme in tech was layoffs and cost cuts. Many of the biggest companies in the industry, including Meta, Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft, were eliminating thousands of jobs following a dismal 2022 for revenue growth and stock prices. In earnings reports, they emphasized efficiency and their ability to “do more with less,” a theme that resonates with the Wall Street crowd.
But investors have shifted their focus to AI now that companies are showcasing real-world applications of the long-hyped technology. OpenAI has exploded after releasing the chatbot ChatGPT last year, and its biggest investor, Microsoft, is embedding the core technology in as many products as it can.
The chipmaker, known best for its graphics processing units (GPUs) that power advanced video games, is riding the AI wave. The stock soared 25% this week to a record and lifted the company’s market cap to nearly $1 trillion after first-quarter earnings topped estimates.
Nvidia shares are now up 167% this year, topping all companies in the S&P 500. The next three top gainers in the index are also tech companies: Meta, Advanced Micro Devices and Salesforce.
The story for Nvidia is based on what’s coming, as its revenue in the latest quarter fell 13% from a year earlier because of a 38% drop in the gaming division. But the company’s sales forecast for the current quarter was roughly 50% higher than Wall Street estimates, and CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia is seeing “surging demand” for its data center products.
Nvidia said cloud vendors and internet companies are buying up GPU chips and using the processors to train and deploy generative AI applications like ChatGPT.
“At this point in the cycle, I think it’s really important to not fight consensus,” said Brent Bracelin, an analyst at Piper Sandler who covers cloud and software companies, in a Friday interview on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.”
“The consensus is, on AI, the big get bigger,” Bracelin said. “And I think that’s going to continue to be the best way to play the AI trends.”
Microsoft, which Bracelin recommends buying, rose 4.6% this week and is now up 39% for the year. Meta gained 6.7% for the week and has more than doubled in 2023 after losing almost two-thirds of its value last year. Alphabet rose 1.5% this week, bringing its increase for the year to 41%.
One of the biggest drags on tech stocks last year was the central bank’s consistent interest rate hikes. The increases have continued into 2023, with the fed funds target range climbing to 5%-5.25% in early May. But at the last Fed meeting, some members indicated that they expected a slowdown in economic growth to remove the need for further tightening, according to minutes released on Wednesday.
Less aggressive monetary policy is seen as a bullish sign for tech and other riskier assets, which typically outperform in a more stable rate environment.
Still, some investors are concerned that the tech rally has gone too far given the vulnerabilities that remain in the economy and in government. The divided Congress is making a debt ceiling deal difficult as the Treasury Department’s June 1 deadline approaches. Republican negotiator Rep. Garret Graves of Louisiana told reporters Friday afternoon in the Capitol that, “We continue to have major issues that we have not bridged the gap on.”
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said later on Friday that the U.S. will likely have enough reserves to push off a potential debt default until June 5.
Alli McCartney, managing director at UBS Private Wealth Management, told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Friday that following the recent rebound in tech stocks, “it’s probably time to take some of that off the table.” She said her group has spent a lot of time looking at the venture market and where deals are happening, and they’ve noticed some clear froth.
“You’re either AI or you’re not right now,” McCartney said. “We really have to be ready to see if we don’t get a perfect debt ceiling, if we don’t get a perfect landing, what does that mean, because at these kinds of levels we are definitely pricing in the U.S. hitting the high note on everything and that seems like a terribly precarious place to be given the risks out there.”
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., left, arrives at federal court in San Jose, California, US, on Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2022.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Toward the end of 2022, engineers on Meta’s team combating misinformation were ready to debut a key fact-checking tool that had taken half a year to build. The company needed all the reputational help it could get after a string of crises had badly damaged the credibility of Facebook and Instagram and given regulators additional ammunition to bear down on the platforms.
The new product would let third-party fact-checkers like The Associated Press and Reuters, as well as credible experts, add comments at the top of questionable articles on Facebook as a way to verify their trustworthiness.
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But CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment to make 2023 the “year of efficiency” spelled the end of the ambitious effort, according to three people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality agreements.
Over multiple rounds of layoffs, Meta announced plans to eliminate roughly 21,000 jobs, a mass downsizing that had an outsized effect on the company’s trust and safety work. The fact-checking tool, which had initial buy-in from executives and was still in a testing phase early this year, was completely dissolved, the sources said.
A Meta spokesperson did not respond to questions related to job cuts in specific areas and said in an emailed statement that “we remain focused on advancing our industry-leading integrity efforts and continue to invest in teams and technologies to protect our community.”
Across the tech industry, as companies tighten their belts and impose hefty layoffs to address macroeconomic pressures and slowing revenue growth, wide swaths of people tasked with protecting the internet’s most-populous playgrounds are being shown the exits. The cuts come at a time of increased cyberbullying, which has been linked to higher rates of adolescent self-harm, and as the spread of misinformation and violent content collides with the exploding use of artificial intelligence.
In their most recent earnings calls, tech executives highlighted their commitment to “do more with less,” boosting productivity with fewer resources. Meta, Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft have all cut thousands of jobs after staffing up rapidly before and during the Covid pandemic. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently said his company would suspend salary increases for full-time employees.
The slashing of teams tasked with trust and safety and AI ethics is a sign of how far companies are willing to go to meet Wall Street demands for efficiency, even with the 2024 U.S. election season — and the online chaos that’s expected to ensue — just months away from kickoff. AI ethics and trust and safety are different departments within tech companies but are aligned on goals related to limiting real-life harm that can stem from use of their companies’ products and services.
“Abuse actors are usually ahead of the game; it’s cat and mouse,” said Arjun Narayan, who previously served as a trust and safety lead at Google and TikTok parent ByteDance, and is now head of trust and safety at news aggregator app Smart News. “You’re always playing catch-up.”
For now, tech companies seem to view both trust and safety and AI ethics as cost centers.
Twitter effectively disbanded its ethical AI team in November and laid off all but one of its members, along with 15% of its trust and safety department, according to reports. In February, Google cut about one-third of a unit that aims to protect society from misinformation, radicalization, toxicity and censorship. Meta reportedly ended the contracts of about 200 content moderators in early January. It also laid off at least 16 members of Instagram’s well-being group and more than 100 positions related to trust, integrity and responsibility, according to documents filed with the U.S. Department of Labor.
Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of Amazon.Com Inc., during the GeekWire Summit in Seattle, Washington, U.S., on Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2021.
David Ryder | Bloomberg | Getty Images
In March, Amazon downsized its responsible AI team and Microsoft laid off its entire ethics and society team – the second of two layoff rounds that reportedly took the team from 30 members to zero. Amazon didn’t respond to a request for comment, and Microsoft pointed to a blog post regarding its job cuts.
At Amazon’s game streaming unit Twitch, staffers learned of their fate in March from an ill-timed internal post from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
Jassy’s announcement that 9,000 jobs would be cut companywide included 400 employees at Twitch. Of those, about 50 were part of the team responsible for monitoring abusive, illegal or harmful behavior, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details were private.
The trust and safety team, or T&S as it’s known internally, was losing about 15% of its staff just as content moderation was seemingly more important than ever.
In an email to employees, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy didn’t call out the T&S department specifically, but he confirmed the broader cuts among his staffers, who had just learned about the layoffs from Jassy’s post on a message board.
“I’m disappointed to share the news this way before we’re able to communicate directly to those who will be impacted,” Clancy wrote in the email, which was viewed by CNBC.
A current member of Twitch’s T&S team said the remaining employees in the unit are feeling “whiplash” and worry about a potential second round of layoffs. The person said the cuts caused a big hit to institutional knowledge, adding that there was a significant reduction in Twitch’s law enforcement response team, which deals with physical threats, violence, terrorism groups and self-harm.
A Twitch spokesperson did not provide a comment for this story, instead directing CNBC to a blog post from March announcing the layoffs. The post didn’t include any mention of trust and safety or content moderation.
Narayan of Smart News said that with a lack of investment in safety at the major platforms, companies lose their ability to scale in a way that keeps pace with malicious activity. As more problematic content spreads, there’s an “erosion of trust,” he said.
“In the long run, it’s really hard to win back consumer trust,” Narayan added.
While layoffs at Meta and Amazon followed demands from investors and a dramatic slump in ad revenue and share prices, Twitter’s cuts resulted from a change in ownership.
Almost immediately after Elon Musk closed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter in October, he began eliminating thousands of jobs. That included all but one member of the company’s 17-person AI ethics team, according to Rumman Chowdhury, who served as director of Twitter’s machine learning ethics, transparency and accountability team. The last remaining person ended up quitting.
The team members learned of their status when their laptops were turned off remotely, Chowdhury said. Hours later, they received email notifications.
“I had just recently gotten head count to build out my AI red team, so these would be the people who would adversarially hack our models from an ethical perspective and try to do that work,” Chowdhury told CNBC. She added, “It really just felt like the rug was pulled as my team was getting into our stride.”
Part of that stride involved working on “algorithmic amplification monitoring,” Chowdhury said, or tracking elections and political parties to see if “content was being amplified in a way that it shouldn’t.”
Chowdhury referenced an initiative in July 2021, when Twitter’s AI ethics team led what was billed as the industry’s first-ever algorithmic bias bounty competition. The company invited outsiders to audit the platform for bias, and made the results public.
Chowdhury said she worries that now Musk “is actively seeking to undo all the work we have done.”
“There is no internal accountability,” she said. “We served two of the product teams to make sure that what’s happening behind the scenes was serving the people on the platform equitably.”
Twitter did not provide a comment for this story.
Advertisers are pulling back in places where they see increased reputational risk.
According to Sensor Tower, six of the top 10 categories of U.S. advertisers on Twitter spent much less in the first quarter of this year compared with a year earlier, with that group collectively slashing its spending by 53%. The site has recently come under fire for allowing the spread of violent images and videos.
The rapid rise in popularity of chatbots is only complicating matters. The types of AI models created by OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and others make it easier to populate fake accounts with content. Researchers from the Allen Institute for AI, Princeton University and Georgia Tech ran tests in ChatGPT’s application programming interface (API), and found up to a sixfold increase in toxicity, depending on which type of functional identity, such as a customer service agent or virtual assistant, a company assigned to the chatbot.
Regulators are paying close attention to AI’s growing influence and the simultaneous downsizing of groups dedicated to AI ethics and trust and safety. Michael Atleson, an attorney at the Federal Trade Commission’s division of advertising practices, called out the paradox in a blog post earlier this month.
“Given these many concerns about the use of new AI tools, it’s perhaps not the best time for firms building or deploying them to remove or fire personnel devoted to ethics and responsibility for AI and engineering,” Atleson wrote. “If the FTC comes calling and you want to convince us that you adequately assessed risks and mitigated harms, these reductions might not be a good look.”
For years, as the tech industry was enjoying an extended bull market and the top internet platforms were flush with cash, Meta was viewed by many experts as a leader in prioritizing ethics and safety.
The company spent years hiring trust and safety workers, including many with academic backgrounds in the social sciences, to help avoid a repeat of the 2016 presidential election cycle, when disinformation campaigns, often operated by foreign actors, ran rampant on Facebook. The embarrassment culminated in the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, which exposed how a third party was illicitly using personal data from Facebook.
But following a brutal 2022 for Meta’s ad business — and its stock price — Zuckerberg went into cutting mode, winning plaudits along the way from investors who had complained of the company’s bloat.
Beyond the fact-checking project, the layoffs hit researchers, engineers, user design experts and others who worked on issues pertaining to societal concerns. The company’s dedicated team focused on combating misinformation suffered numerous losses, four former Meta employees said.
Prior to Meta’s first round of layoffs in November, the company had already taken steps to consolidate members of its integrity team into a single unit. In September, Meta merged its central integrity team, which handles social matters, with its business integrity group tasked with addressing ads and business-related issues like spam and fake accounts, ex-employees said.
In the ensuing months, as broader cuts swept across the company, former trust and safety employees described working under the fear of looming layoffs and for managers who sometimes failed to see how their work affected Meta’s bottom line.
For example, things like improving spam filters that required fewer resources could get clearance over long-term safety projects that would entail policy changes, such as initiatives involving misinformation. Employees felt incentivized to take on more manageable tasks because they could show their results in their six-month performance reviews, ex-staffers said.
Ravi Iyer, a former Meta project manager who left the company before the layoffs, said that the cuts across content moderation are less bothersome than the fact that many of the people he knows who lost their jobs were performing critical roles on design and policy changes.
“I don’t think we should reflexively think that having fewer trust and safety workers means platforms will necessarily be worse,” said Iyer, who’s now the managing director of the Psychology of Technology Institute at University of Southern California’s Neely Center. “However, many of the people I’ve seen laid off are amongst the most thoughtful in rethinking the fundamental designs of these platforms, and if platforms are not going to invest in reconsidering design choices that have been proven to be harmful — then yes, we should all be worried.”
A Meta spokesperson previously downplayed the significance of the job cuts in the misinformation unit, tweeting that the “team has been integrated into the broader content integrity team, which is substantially larger and focused on integrity work across the company.”
Still, sources familiar with the matter said that following the layoffs, the company has fewer people working on misinformation issues.
For those who’ve gained expertise in AI ethics, trust and safety and related content moderation, the employment picture looks grim.
Newly unemployed workers in those fields from across the social media landscape told CNBC that there aren’t many job openings in their area of specialization as companies continue to trim costs. One former Meta employee said that after interviewing for trust and safety roles at Microsoft and Google, those positions were suddenly axed.
An ex-Meta staffer said the company’s retreat from trust and safety is likely to filter down to smaller peers and startups that appear to be “following Meta in terms of their layoff strategy.”
Chowdhury, Twitter’s former AI ethics lead, said these types of jobs are a natural place for cuts because “they’re not seen as driving profit in product.”
“My perspective is that it’s completely the wrong framing,” she said. “But it’s hard to demonstrate value when your value is that you’re not being sued or someone is not being harmed. We don’t have a shiny widget or a fancy model at the end of what we do; what we have is a community that’s safe and protected. That is a long-term financial benefit, but in the quarter over quarter, it’s really hard to measure what that means.”
At Twitch, the T&S team included people who knew where to look to spot dangerous activity, according to a former employee in the group. That’s particularly important in gaming, which is “its own unique beast,” the person said.
Now, there are fewer people checking in on the “dark, scary places” where offenders hide and abusive activity gets groomed, the ex-employee added.
More importantly, nobody knows how bad it can get.
“Competed in my first jiu jitsu tournament and won some medals for the Guerrilla Jiu Jitsu team,” he penned alongside a series of photos and videos from the tournament, thanking his training team for helping him meet his goal.
The tournament took place in the Bay Area at Woodside High School in Woodside, California on Saturday, May 6.
Zuckerberg first revealed his interest in mixed martial arts on “The Joe Rogan Experience” last August, telling Rogan that he had picked it up during the pandemic as a way to realign his focus and get physical for the day.
“MMA is the perfect thing,” the billionaire said on the podcast. “After an hour or two of working out, or rolling or wrestling with friends, or training with different folks, it’s like now I’m ready to go solve whatever problem at work for the day.”
A month later, one of his trainers told The Information that he had been working with Zuck one-on-one to help develop his skillset and sharpen his role as a fighter.
“You’d never expect these guys to be able to take you down. Next thing you know, they’re attacking you with these extremely technical moves,” said Khai Wu, Zuckerberg’s trainer at the Guerrilla Jiu-Jitsu Academy in San Jose, at the time. “You don’t know this nerd is a silent killer.”
In October 2022, Zuckerberg took his love for the sport one step further by privately renting out the UFC APEX arena in Las Vegas to watch the match between female fighters Yan Xiaonan and Mackenzie Dern.
Zuckerberg’s net worth was an estimated $85.3 billion as of Monday afternoon.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg bagged gold and silver medals this weekend at his first jiu-jitsu tournament.
A series of six photos, posted to Facebook and Instagram, shows the Meta founder grappling with two different opponents at the Brazilian jiu-jitsu competition, which was held Saturday at Woodside High School in Woodside, California, just north of Silicon Valley. Other images show a referee declaring Zuckerberg victorious after the two matches.
“Competed in my first jiu jitsu tournament and won some medals for the Guerrilla Jiu Jitsu team,” Zuckerberg wrote beneath the photos, which racked up more than 400,000 likes on Instagram and 300,000 likes on Facebook. “Thanks to Dave Camarillo, Khai Wu, and James Terry for training me!” reads one caption.
The post features a photo of the CEO posing alongside members of the Gorilla Jiu Jitsu team, at a Bay Area-gym where he competed. The last image shows a pensive Zuckerberg approaching a gym mat.
Competed in my first jiu jitsu tournament and won some medals 🥇🥈 for the Guerrilla Jiu Jitsu team. Thanks to Dave Camarillo, Khai Wu, and James Terry for training me!
Zuckerberg began studying mixed martial arts during the coronavirus pandemic and quickly became enamored with the sport, he told in an August interview with podcast host Joe Rogan, himself a noted practitioner and fan of the sport. The sport’s “primal” nature has helped Zuckerberg boost his energy level as he tackles challenges at work, he told Rogan.
“MMA is the perfect thing,” Zuckerberg said on the podcast. “After an hour or two of working out, or rolling or wrestling with friends, or training with different folks, it’s like now I’m ready to go solve whatever problem at work for the day.”
Zuckerberg trains with Dave Camarillo of Gorilla Jiu Jitsu, who has taught several UFC champions. Since beginning his jiu-jitsu journey, Zuckerberg has convinced several of his friends to start hitting the gym as well, he told Rogan.
From the C-suite to the mat
Zuckerberg isn’t the only tech tycoon who has been hitting the gym.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, 51, also trains in jiu-jitsu at a California gym he said on Rogan’s show in 2021. PayPal CEO Dan Schulman has a well-documented affinity for krav maga, an Israeli self-defense practice that the 65-year-old has credited with teaching him how to pick his battles and keep advancing toward his goals. Palantir CEO Alex Karp, 55, has practiced both jiu-jitsu and aikido — a Japanese art of self-defense, Fortune reported.
Martial arts and other sports might offer much-needed stress relief for tech CEOs, especially given the industry’s recent slump. Tech companies have been battered by waves of layoffs as they record weaker earnings.
Meta’s net income fell 24% to $5.71 billion during the first quarter of 2023. Last week, the social media company also revealed it would shed an additional 1,500 jobs in the Bay Area as part of its plan to reduce its worker headcount by 21,000, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
The Metaverse, the once-buzzy technology that promised to allow users to hang out awkwardly in a disorientating video-game-like world, has died after being abandoned by the business world. It was three years old.
The capital-M Metaverse, a descendant of the 1982 movie “Tron” and the 2003 video game “Second Life,” was born in 2021 when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of his trillion-dollar company to Meta. After a much-heralded debut, the Metaverse became the obsession of the tech world and a quick hack to win over Wall Street investors. The hype could not save the Metaverse, however, and a lack of coherent vision for the product ultimately led to its decline. Once the tech industry turned to a new, more promising trend — generative AI — the fate of the Metaverse was sealed.
The Metaverse is now headed to the tech industry’s graveyard of failed ideas. But the short life and ignominious death of the Metaverse offers a glaring indictment of the tech industry that birthed it.
Grand promise
From the moment of its delivery, Zuckerberg claimed that the Metaverse would be the future of the internet. The glitzy, spurious promotional video that accompanied Zuckerberg’s name-change announcement described a future where we’d be able to interact seamlessly in virtual worlds: Users would “make eye contact” and “feel like you’re right in the room together.” The Metaverse offered people the chance to engage in an “immersive” experience, he claimed.
These grandiose promises heaped sky-high expectations on the Metaverse. The media swooned over the newborn concept: The Verge published a nearly 5,000-word-long interview with Zuckerberg immediately following the announcement — in which the writer called it “an expansive, immersive vision of the internet.” Glowing profiles of the Metaverse seemed to set it on a laudatory path, but the actual technology failed to deliver on this promise throughout its short life. A wonky virtual-reality interview with the CBS host Gayle King, where low-quality cartoon avatars of both King and Zuckerberg awkwardly motioned to each other, was a stark contrast to the futuristic vistas shown in Meta’s splashy introductory video.
The Metaverse also suffered from an acute identity crisis. A functional business proposition requires a few things to thrive and grow: a clear use case, a target audience, and the willingness of customers to adopt the product. Zuckerberg waxed poetic about the Metaverse as “a vision that spans many companies” and “the successor to the mobile internet,” but he failed to articulate the basic business problems that the Metaverse would address. The concept of virtual worlds where users interact with each other using digital avatars is an old one, going back as far as the late 1990s with massively multiplayer online role-player games, such as “Meridian 59,” “Ultimate Online,” and “EverQuest.” And while the Metaverse supposedly built on these ideas with new technology, Zuckerberg’s one actual product — the VR platform Horizon Worlds, which required the use of an incredibly clunky Oculus headset — failed to suggest anything approaching a road map or a genuine vision. In spite of the Metaverse’s arrested conceptual development, a pliant press published statements about the future of the technology that were somewhere between unrealistic and outright irresponsible. The CNBC host Jim Cramer nodded approvingly when Zuckerberg claimed that 1 billion people would use the Metaverse and spend hundreds of dollars there, despite the Meta CEO’s inability to say what people would receive in exchange for their cash or why anyone would want to strap a clunky headset to their face to attend a low-quality, cartoon concert.
A high-flying life
The inability to define the Metaverse in any meaningful way didn’t get in the way of its ascension to the top of the business world. In the months following the Meta announcement, it seemed that every company had a Metaverse product on offer, despite it not being obvious what it was or why they should.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella would say at the company’s 2021 Ignite Conference that he couldn’t “overstate how much of a breakthrough” the Metaverse was for his company, the industry, and the world. Roblox, an online game platform that has existed since 2004, rode the Metaverse hype wave to an initial public offering and a $41 billion valuation. Of course, the cryptocurrency industry took the ball and ran with it: The people behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT company conned the press into believing that uploading someone’s digital monkey pictures into VR would be the key to “master the Metaverse.” Other crypto pumpers even successfully convinced people that digital land in the Metaverse would be the next frontier of real-estate investment. Even businesses that seemed to have little to do with tech jumped on board. Walmart joined the Metaverse. Disney joined the Metaverse.
Despite Zuckerberg’s obsession with the Metaverse, the tech never lived up to the hype. Facebook
Companies’ rush to get into the game led Wall Street investors, consultants, and analysts to try to one up each other’s projections for the Metaverse’s growth. The consulting firm Gartner claimed that 25% of people would spend at least one hour a day in the Metaverse by 2026. The Wall Street Journal said the Metaverse would change the way we work forever. The global consulting firm McKinsey predicted that the Metaverse could generate up to “$5 trillion in value,” adding that around 95% of business leaders expected the Metaverse to “positively impact their industry” within five to 10 years. Not to be outdone, Citi put out a massive report that declared the Metaverse would be a $13 trillion opportunity.
A brutal downfall
In spite of all this hype, the Metaverse did not lead a healthy life. Every single business idea or rosy market projection was built on the vague promises of a single CEO. And when people were actually offered the opportunity to try it out, nobody actually used the Metaverse.
Decentraland, the most well-funded, decentralized, crypto-based Metaverse product (effectively a wonky online world you can “walk” around), only had around 38 daily active users in its “$1.3 billion ecosystem.” Decentraland would dispute this number, claiming that it had 8,000 daily active users — but that’s still only a fraction of the number of people playing large online games like “Fortnite.” Meta’s much-heralded efforts similarly struggled: By October 2022, Mashable reported that Horizon Worlds had less than 200,000 monthly active users — dramatically short of the 500,000 target Meta had set for the end of 2022. The Wall Street Journal reported that only about 9% of user-created worlds were visited by more than 50 players, and The Verge said that it was so buggy that even Meta employees eschewed it. Despite the might of a then-trillion-dollar company, Meta could not convince people to use the product it had staked its future on.
But the Metaverse was officially pulled off life support when it became clear that Zuckerberg and the company that launched the craze had moved on to greener financial pastures. Zuckerberg declared in a March update that Meta’s “single largest investment is advancing AI and building it into every one of our products.” Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, told CNBC in April that he, along with Mark Zuckerberg and the company’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, were now spending most of their time on AI. The company has even stopped pitching the Metaverse to advertisers, despite spending more than $100 billion in research and development on its mission to be “Metaverse first.” While Zuckerberg may suggest that developing games for the Quest headsets is some sort of investment, the writing is on the wall: Meta is done with the Metaverse.
Did anyone learn their lesson?
While the idea of virtual worlds or collective online experiences may live on in some form, the Capital-M Metaverse is dead. It was preceded in death by a long line of tech fads like Web3 and Google Glass. It is survived by newfangled ideas like the aforementioned generative AI and the self-driving car. Despite this long lineage of disappointment, let’s be clear: The death of the Metaverse should be remembered as arguably one of the most historic failures in tech history.
I do not believe that Mark Zuckerberg ever had any real interest in “the Metaverse,” because he never seemed to define it beyond a slightly tweaked Facebook with avatars and cumbersome hardware. It was the means to an increased share price, rather than any real vision for the future of human interaction. And Zuckerberg used his outsize wealth and power to get the whole of the tech industry and a good portion of the American business world into line behind this half-baked idea.
The fact that Mark Zuckerberg has clearly stepped away from the Metaverse is a damning indictment of everyone who followed him, and anyone who still considers him a visionary tech leader. It should also be the cause for some serious reflection among the venture-capital community, which recklessly followed Zuckerberg into blowing billions of dollars on a hype cycle founded on the flimsiest possible press-release language. In a just world, Mark Zuckerberg should be fired as CEO of Meta (in the real world, this is actually impossible).
Zuckerberg misled everyone, burned tens of billions of dollars, convinced an industry of followers to submit to his quixotic obsession, and then killed it the second that another idea started to interest Wall Street. There is no reason that a man who has overseen the layoffs of tens of thousands of people should run a major company. There is no future for Meta with Mark Zuckerberg at the helm: It will stagnate, and then it will die and follow the Metaverse into the proverbial grave.
Ed Zitron is the CEO of EZPR, a national tech and business public-relations agency. He is also the author of the tech and culture newsletter Where’s Your Ed At.
A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.
New York CNN
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First Republic Bank has been teetering on the edge for weeks. It may be finally falling.
The San Francisco-based lender could be next in the line to collapse, following in the footsteps of former competitors Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.
It certainly fits the bill: First Republic
(FRC), like SVB, is a mid-sized regional bank with a highly concentrated customer base, outsized amounts of uninsured deposits and loads of unrealized losses on the bonds and treasuries it holds.
Rumors swirled on Wednesday as publications rushed out reports from unnamed sources saying that the bank was looking to cut a deal to sell assets, that the White House wasn’t interested in facilitating a bailout (there were also reports that it is) and that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is considering downgrading the bank’s debt, which would limit its access to essential Federal Reserve loans.
The FDIC, Federal Reserve, White House and First Republic did not respond to requests for comment about those reports. But the damage has been done.
Shares of the stock fell by nearly 30% on Wednesday, after plunging by 49% on Tuesday. The stock’s trading was halted numerous times both days as its rapid decline triggered volatility-triggered timeouts by the New York Stock Exchange.
But what’s actually happening here?
The reality of the situation: What we do know for certain is that First Republic reported on Monday that its total deposits fell 41% in the first quarter of 2023 to $104.5 billion, even after a consortium of banks stepped in with $30 billion to prevent the lender from failing. Without that cash infusion, deposits would have fallen by over 50%.
But, importantly, the bank said that while it saw a sharp drop in deposit activity after the collapse of SVB and Signature Bank last month, activity began to stabilize at the end of March and has since remained steady.
We also know that First Republic’s net interest income, which shows how much money the bank earned from lending and borrowing, was down 19.4% year-over-year at the end of the first quarter.
On top of all that, the bank is vulnerable to liquidity problems.
When the banking crisis erupted in mid-March, about two-thirds of First Republic’s deposits were uninsured with the FDIC. That’s lower than the 94% at Silicon Valley Bank — but at the end of last year, First Republic had an exceptionally high ratio of 111% for loans and long-term investments to deposits, according to S&P Global — meaning it has loaned and invested more money than it has in deposits.
In short: The outlook for the bank is not good.
“It’s becoming clearer each day” that First Republic is “toast,” said Don Bilson at Gordon Haskett, in a note Wednesday. “The only question that really needs to be answered is whether the [Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation] moves in before the weekend or during the weekend, which is when it usually does its thing.”
Possible solutions: We also know that it’s not over until it’s over, and that the bank is still operating. There are still some narrow paths forward.
There’s a small chance that First Republic stays the course and “muddles along as a standalone company,” said David Chiaverini, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities.
What’s more likely is that the company will try to sell some of its loans and securities at the same cost they bought them for. In exchange, the buyer would receive a preferred equity interest in the company.
That will be a tough sell since those assets would probably sell for well above market rate. First Republic’s bonds maturing in 2046 are currently trading at just 43 cents on the dollar. But the bank has been lucky before. First Republic has stayed afloat since March largely thanks to a $30 billion bailout from a conglomerate of large US banks and a $70 billion line of credit from JPMorgan.
The third option is the worst for shareholders: the bank could go into receivership. When a struggling bank goes into receivership it means that a regulatory authority or government agency takes control of the bank and its assets, usually with the goal of liquidating those assets to repaythe bank’s creditors.
Investors in First Republic would most likely see their money wiped out in that scenario.
Coming next: First Republic is in a very tricky situation. Investors will be crossing their fingers and holding their breath until Friday at 4 p.m. ET. That’s when newly-collapsed banks have admitted defeat in the past.
Facebook-parent Meta on Wednesday reported that it grew sales by 3% during the first three months of the year, reversing a trend of three consecutive quarters of revenue declines and far exceeding Wall Street analysts’ expectations, reports my colleague Clare Duffy.
Meta shares jumped as much as 12% in after-hours trading following the report, continuing the company’s strong trajectory since CEO MarkZuckerberg announced that 2023 would be a “year of efficiency.”
Another bright spot: user growth was relatively strong compared to recent quarters. The number of monthly active people on Meta’s family of apps grew 5% from the prior year to more than 3.8 billion and Facebook daily active users increased 4% to more than 2 billion.
Still, Meta has a big hill ahead of it. The company also reported that profits declined by nearly a quarter to $5.7 billion compared to the same period in the prior year. Price per advertisement — an indicator of the health of the company’s core digital ad business — also decreased by 17% from the year prior.
Meta has been in the midst of a massive restructuring, as it attempts to recover from a perfect storm of heightened competition, lingering recession fears resulting in fewer ad dollars and a multibillion dollar effort to build a future version of the internet it calls the metaverse.
Meta said in November it would eliminate 11,000 jobs, the single largest round of cuts in its history. And in March, Zuckerberg announced Meta would lay off another 10,000 employees. All told, the cuts will shrink Meta’s workforce by a quarter.
Despite mass layoffs and cost-cutting initiatives throughout the tech industry, some top executives are still receiving ample compensation.
During a virtual Q&A session with Meta employees last week, workers grilled CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the six-figure bonuses given to executives amid the company’s turbulent time of layoffs and stock dips.
According to the company’s SEC filing released last week, C-suite executives at Meta received six-figure bonuses in 2022: CFO Susan Li ($575,613), CPO Christoper Cox ($940,214), COO Javier Olivan ($786,552), CTO Andrew Bosworth ($714,588), Strategy Officer (CSO) David Whener ($712,284) and former COO Sheryl Sandberg ($298,385).
“Why did the entire executive team get EE/GE ratings [short-hand for top-tier performance reviews at Meta] 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?” one employee asked, per The Wall Street Journal.
The company’s filing stated that C-suite executives received bonuses based on individual performance calculations, with the target percentage being 75%. Each executive is reported to have exceeded expectations well beyond the target and received bonuses in six figures.
Zuckerberg allegedly said that some of the executives had stepped into new roles and “taken on expanded scopes,” an employee present for the meeting told Insider.
The CEO’s response felt “shallow” and “patronizing,” the person told the outlet.
Meta has declined to comment to Entrepreneur.
However, Meta isn’t the only tech giant that gave out generous bonuses amid downsizing.
Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai received compensation of nearly $226 million in 2022, according to the company’s SEC filing last week. His total compensation for 2021 was $6,322,599. All five other top executives at Alphabet also received compensation in the millions for 2022, with an increase of at least nine million compared to the year before.
Pinchai’s significant jump in compensation is mostly attributed to the $218 million in stock awards for 2022 (he had none in 2020 or 2021).
In January, Google announced it would be laying off 12,000 employees. The company also informed staff it would be cutting back on some of the office perks and programs as a means of cost-cutting.
Entrepreneur has reached out to Google for comment.
The metaverse is no place for kids, according to a group of more than 70 advocates for children’s rights and online privacy. Those concerned are asking Facebook’s parent company, Meta, to abandon its plans to attract young teens onto its Horizon Worlds metaverse platform because, they say, doing so will likely expose minors to sexually explicit and homophobic content.
Top executives at the Center for Digital Democracy, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Fairplay and other organizations sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday arguing that allowing minors onto Horizon would also expose them to bullying.
The letter comes one month after a Wall Street Journal article revealed that Meta aims to draw kids ages 13-17 onto the platform where users interact with each other. Currently the app only allows players 18 and older.
“Meta is demonstrating once again that it doesn’t consider the best interest of young people when it develops plans to expand its business operations,” Katharina Kopp, deputy director for the Center for Digital Democracy, said in a statement. “Before it considers opening its Horizon Worlds metaverse operation to teens, it should first commit to fully exploring the potential consequences.”
Meta vowed Friday to make sure minors aren’t exposed to explicit material while on Horizon Worlds.
“Before we make Horizon Worlds available to teens, we will have additional protections and tools in place to help provide age-appropriate experiences for them,” a company spokesperson told CBS News. “Quest headsets are for people 13+ and we encourage parents and caretakers to use our parental supervision tools, including managing access to apps, to help ensure safe experiences.”
Some users as young as 15 are already on Horizon Worlds and they have been exposed to racist insults and misogynistic language, advocates wrote, while pointing to a CCDH study published last month. Researchers from the study recorded interactions from 100 of Horizon Worlds’ most populated spaces and found that minors occupy 66 of those VR worlds. In one interaction inside a virtual courtroom, a user noticed a minor with a Black avatar was told “you’re Black, you’re sentenced to death, get out of here.”
Horizon Worlds is Meta’s free social app where users don an Oculus headset, dive into a virtual reality environment, explore different spaces and interact with other users in real time. Meta launched it in December 2021, sparking a race with other tech companies to assert dominance in the metaverse market. So far, Meta has spent — and lost — billions of dollars in its effort to rule virtual spaces.
“Potential life-long users”
“Getting teens to use the platform is essential to Meta’s bottom line because they are potential life-long users, and their presence and support can make the platform seem trendy,” advocates wrote in their letter to Zuckerberg. “But what may be good for your bottom line may be incredibly harmful to young people.”
Meta, which also owns Instagram, has been called out in the past for how teenagers use its platforms. Company documents show that Meta is aware of negative effects Instagram has on the self-image of many young users, particularly for teenage girls, but still gives them access, the Journal reported in 2021.
“Meta is making the same mistake with Horizon Worlds that it made with Facebook and Instagram,” Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said in a statement. “They have prioritized profit over safety in their design of the product, failed to provide meaningful transparency, and refused to take responsibility for ensuring worlds are safe, especially for children.”
Meta officials are now focused on opening Horizon Worlds specifically to 13 to 17-year-olds in an effort to improve user retention on the platform, the Journal reported, citing an internal memo from the tech giant. Meta hopes to increase the retention rate to 20%, up from the 11% the platform saw in January, according to the memo.
Khristopher J. Brooks is a reporter for CBS MoneyWatch covering business, consumer and financial stories that range from economic inequality and housing issues to bankruptcies and the business of sports.
Kara Swisher, rocking aviators, AirPods, and a “Lesbians Who Tech” sweatshirt, rolls into Vox Media’s DC headquarters and gets right to work. Today’s episode of On with Kara Swisher, a twice-weekly podcast that launched in September, is about the future of the Republican Party after the House Speaker free-for-all, and she’s tapped CNN’s Manu Raju and The Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes to make sense of the mess. Once the guests come on camera, Swisher apologizes for wearing sunglasses, explaining that she forgot her prescription pair at home.
“It’s very Dark Brandon,” says Raju.
“I had it before him,” Swisher shoots back. “Let’s be clear on that situation.”
Swisher, as an interviewer, shows little tolerance for bloviating; she gets to the point. About halfway through the episode, she calls for a “lightning round” of House Republicans, asking Sykes to “tell us if the person is a true believer or a phony.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene?
“She is a conspiracy theorist, batshit-crazy bigot, and antisemite, and for some reason that has made her a rock star in the Republican Party,” says Sykes, a Never Trump–style conservative. And? “She’s a believer—it’s bullshit, but she believes in it.”
After wrapping up the podcast, her third taping that day, Swisher keeps up a rapid-fire patter with me. In the course of a few minutes, she bemoans the lack of “entrepreneurial” reporters, recalls “a big fight with Roger Goodell” after the NFL commissioner suggested her sons play football, and mentions talking the previous night with superagent Ari Emanuel about bull riding. But just like that, Swisher has to run—not to CNN, where she’s booked to appear that night—but for drinks with executives from CNBC. She recently declined to re-sign her contributor contract with the network because she felt constrained by its exclusivity rules “and the money wasn’t enough to keep me there.” Now they’ve come to talk to her again. “I always get approached by the networks,” Swisher tells me. “And they just never”—she lets out an exasperated sigh—“they never know what they want to make.”
Which is not a problem she seems to have. Beyond On, Swisher, 60, also hosts Pivot, a twice-weekly podcast with brash NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway; is writing a memoir about her beat-reporting days covering the dawn of the web; is working on a fictional TV show with another veteran Silicon Valley journalist; is advising Post News, a social platform she hopes will be a Twitter competitor; and is raising four kids, two of whom are toddlers. “She has a coffee before bed every night, after midnight,” Semafor’s Ben Smith texts. “This seems somehow emblematic to me. (In a good way.)”
Swisher, who is five foot two but “writes tall,” as she likes to say, has carved a considerable niche for herself, cutting across television, the web, podcasts, and social media—becoming “the queen of all media,” as veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg puts it. A former Vox Media colleague is less charitable: “She’s always been searching for a way to make her platform even bigger, and she’s done that. But it begins and ends with her. There’s no legacy beyond that.”
Leaving legacy aside for the moment, Swisher has plowed a path through the media landscape alongside industry shifts, from reporting at a newspaper to blogging to cofounding successful websites and conferences to becoming a brand unto herself—part of a trend of elite journalists walking away from legacy outlets in pursuit of more freedom and, potentially, profits. Last year she gave up a podcast and column at The New York Times largely because, as she says, “I don’t need mama telling me what to do.” And she stepped back from Code, the iconic tech conference she’d organized and hosted for the past two decades. “It was like painting the same painting over and over again,” she tells me, “and I just wanted to make something else.”
On is the sixth podcast Swisher has hosted, but it’s the first where she owns the IP and has complete editorial control. She’s riffed on Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg while expanding her aperture well beyond Silicon Valley, interviewing the likes of Darren Star and Geena Davis, and exploring topics ranging from comedy to death. Swisher’s betting there’s an audience willing to turn to her for more than just expertise on tech moguldom. “I mentor a lot of people, and almost every single one of them is worried about losing their place if they step out of line. And I’m like, the only way you get higher is if you step out of line,” Swisher tells me. “That’s the only way. Seriously. Unless you’re untalented. And then you should stay in line.”
On a Monday afternoon in January, Swisher’s house is chaotic, but the good kind, the kind you find in a place where life is happening. Toys are strewn everywhere and a baby is laughing and sometimes crying and the sink is running in the kitchen, where the Golden Child—as Swisher’s three-year-old daughter is commonly referred to on her podcasts—is about to have a snack. There’s lots of talk of “Elsa cheese,” which is string cheese that Disney has branded with Frozen characters. The Golden Child crawls up onto the counter, where, at the opposite end, Swisher and her wife, the journalist Amanda Katz, are catching up on each other’s day.
“How was the Scaramucci thing? Who won?” Katz asks, referring to a public debate Swisher did that morning with financier Anthony Scaramucci on whether Musk—whom Swisher has known and covered since the ’90s—is killing Twitter.
“I did, obviously,” says Swisher. “I said he is, and it’s killing Elon more than he’s killing it.”
“And then Pivot was good,” Swisher says. “Scott made at least 14 prostitute jokes.”
Despite having a ministroke a decade back, Swisher famously does not like taking time off and works around the clock. In December, “she had heart surgery and she was working the day before and the day after. That’s not an exaggeration,” Galloway tells me. (When I ask Swisher how the surgery went, she replies, “Good, obviously.”) Her turbocharged work ethic could be traced, in part, to tragedy early in life. When she was five, her father died suddenly at 34 of complications from a brain aneurysm. Fresh out of the Navy and with three kids, he’d just purchased his first house and landed a gig as the head of anesthesia at the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital. “He thought he was headed for the big time. He just died—fell over one day. And that has informed everything I’ve done. I’m like, I don’t have time for this,” says Swisher, adding, “You don’t have time, either. Nobody has time.”
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Due to a broad array of economic conditions, many businesses have experienced financial challenges in recent times. Even if your company has been spared from the worst of these economic effects, you will inevitably encounter serious obstacles at some point during your career.
As a leader, there are different ways to handle these challenges in terms of how you keep your employees informed. Some may think it’s best to hold unfavorable information close to their chest, either to keep morale high or to protect their employees from stress. These types of leaders may feel it is their responsibility to protect their team or believe that presenting challenges could ding their reputation.
Mark Zuckerberg recently made headlines when announcing 10,000 more layoffs at Meta, writing “I recognize that sharing plans for restructuring and layoffs months in advance creates a challenging period. But last fall, we heard feedback that you wanted more transparency sooner into any restructuring plans, so that’s what I’m trying to provide here.”
A growing consensus — Zuckerberg apparently now included — believes that transparency during challenging financial times is the best leadership strategy. When you are transparent with your employees about the hardships your company faces, you could see benefits in unexpected ways. Here are five reasons why transparency is the best route when your company is facing challenging times:
Transparency builds trust
Trust is a fundamental building block in any relationship, and it is difficult to overstate the importance of trust in the workplace. Companies with high levels of trust have more productive employees, less turnover and increased morale.
However, a relationship built on trust requires honesty, vulnerability and most importantly, transparency. Challenging or stressful times can be one of the best opportunities to display transparency as a leader and can improve levels of trust among your employees for years to come.
A recent study of hundreds of employees across the United States found that employees working for companies that prioritized transparent communication during times of organizational change were more likely to trust their employer and were more open to organizational changes.
When employers meet regularly with their employees to transparently communicate about financial challenges, the organization as a whole will likely experience a higher degree of trust. Take any financial challenges you may be experiencing as an opportunity to build trust and it will pay off in the long run.
Times of stress and crisis remind us of our shared humanity and can lead to increased displays of kindness and empathy. Empathy in the workplace is important because it boosts employee engagement and loyalty.
As a leader, you should not shy away from vulnerability during challenging financial times, as sharing your fears and emotions with your team can promote feelings of empathy within your company. When you communicate the company’s immediate needs with your employees and honestly relay what is at stake, your employees will be able to understand where you are coming from and be more willing to work hard to overcome these obstacles.
Building an empathetic workplace environment goes both ways, so be sure to provide your employees with a platform to express their emotions regularly. When all parties feel listened to and understood, your company will see concrete benefits.
Everyone can learn from the mistakes made along the way
Knowledge is power. When a leader holds challenges close to their chest, nobody can learn from their mistakes.
Instead, make a habit of regularly reviewing your company’s progress, and open up a dialogue with your employees about what was done well and what could be improved in the future. Giving your team members the platform to express themselves helps you and the rest of your workforce identify where mistakes might have been made along the way.
More importantly, it provides everyone with the opportunity to learn from these mistakes. When employees are in a situation where they understand the financial troubles a business is going through, everyone will be on the same page about the challenges ahead and will work on what matters most. Additionally, your employees might bring in good ideas about where to save money that you as the business owner may not have thought of.
Don’t be afraid to own up to mistakes that you or leadership has made, as accountability and responsibility are some of the hallmark traits of a good leader.
Being vulnerable about where you have made mistakes and taking responsibility for your role in the current situation will not only earn you respect, but it will also promote feelings of trust and empathy among your employees.
It brings the team closer together
Research shows that major events or times of stress bring people together. Case studies on natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina or the Mexico City earthquakes show increased social bonding and cohesion during tragic events. It is human nature to crave social connection during extreme events, so use this to your advantage when dealing with dire situations at your company.
When you are open and transparent about the challenges your company is up against, you are doing more than just providing your team with the opportunity to come together. Challenging times often bring out the best in people and the organizations that they belong to.
People are more likely to act altruistically and tirelessly when they feel they are contributing to a shared common cause. If you are not transparent about the challenges your company is up against, you are denying your employees the chance to come together and find meaning in their work.
Major financial challenges have the potential to build trust, empathy, learning and connection at your company. However, transparency during challenging times is essential if you hope to see these positive benefits. The next time you are up against monumental financial challenges, lean in, and see what transparency during times of crisis can help you achieve.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, launched a paid subscription service in the U.S. on Friday — allowing users on both platforms to pay for verification.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement on his “Meta Channel,” which is one of the latest features the company has rolled out for creators to “directly reach their audience and form deeper connections with their communities,” the company said.
Meta Verified is only available to personal accounts and will cost $14.99 per month if purchased on an iOS or Android device, and $11.99 per month if purchased on the web.
“Meta Verified is rolling out in the U.S. today,” Zuckerberg said on his Meta Channel. “You can get a badge, proactive impersonation protection, and direct access to customer support.”
Zuckerberg’s decision to launch a subscription service for the social media platform comes after the Elon Musk-owned Twitter relaunched its own subscription service, Twitter Blue, last December, after a previous launch attempt failed.
As of now, the company is currently making the service available to users in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand. However, people can join a waitlist to receive a notification when it will be available in their region.
Users that currently have verified badges can also apply for the Meta Verified subscription, but the company said it does not plan to make any changes to those that have already been verified based on prior requirements.
The launch of the service comes as Meta seeks to cut costs and improve financial performance following two rounds of layoffs, the latest of which occurred this week and saw the company lay off about 10,000 workers. Last November, about 11,000 Meta workers were also laid off.
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg faced thousands of anxious employees in an all-staff Town Hall meeting this morning, just two days after announcing that the company would eliminate 10,000 jobs.
According to The Washington Post, which received a transcript of the event, Zuckerberg took questions and tried to explain Meta’s reorganization and restructuring plan.
One employee asked how they could trust him only four months after last November’s bloodbath when Meta laid off roughly 11,000 workers, 13% of its workforce. At that time, Zuckerberg assured workers that there would be no more cuts in the “foreseeable future.”
“I would guess that the way people would evaluate whether you trust me and want to work at this company is whether we are succeeding in making progress toward the overall stated goals,” Zuck said. “I think a lot of this is about the results we are able to deliver.”
Zuckerberg explained that the company was responding to economic pressures that could linger for a while. “But I think it’s a fair question,” he said.
Later, Zuckerberg was asked about the future of remote work at the company.
He answered that it could continue to be “an ongoing conversation,” although he didn’t rule out possible return-to-office mandates. Some major companies, such as Amazon and Disney, require employees to return to the office full-time or part-time.
Another employee asked how they were supposed to remain productive when the threat of layoffs were circling through the campus halls, according to WaPo.
Zuckerberg conceded that this was an uncertain time but added, “it’s not like we can just pause working while we are figuring this out.”
Roughly a year-and-a-half after Facebook renamed itself “Meta” and said it would go all-in on building a future version of the internet dubbed the metaverse, the tech giant now says its top investment priority will be advancing artificial intelligence.
In a letter to staff Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to lay off another 10,000 employees in the coming months, and doubled down on his new focus of “efficiency” for the company. The pivot to efficiency, first announced last month in Meta’s quarterly earnings call, comes after years of investing heavily in growth, including in areas with unproven potential like virtual reality.
Now, Zuckerberg says the company will focus mostly on cutting costs and streamlining projects. Building the metaverse “remains central to defining the future of social connection,” Zuckerberg wrote, but that isn’t where Meta will be putting most of its capital.
“Our single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of our products,” Zuckerberg said Tuesday. He nodded to how AI tools can help users of its apps express themselves and “discover new content,” but also said that new AI tools can be used to increase efficiencies internally by helping “engineers write better code faster.”
The comments come after what the CEO described as a “humbling wake-up call” last year, as the “world economy changed, competitive pressures grew, and our growth slowed considerably.”
Meta and its predecessor Facebook have been involved in AI research for years, but the remarks come amid a heightened AI frenzy in the tech world, kicked off in late November when Microsoft-backed OpenAI publicly released ChatGPT. The technology quickly went viral for its ability to generate compelling, human-sounding responses to user prompts and then kicked off an apparent AI arms race among tech companies. Microsoft announced in early February that it was incorporating the tech behind ChatGPT into its search engine, Bing. A day before Microsoft’s announcement, Google unveiled its own AI-powered tool called Bard. And not to be left behind, Meta announced late last month that it was forming a “top-level product group” to “turbocharge” the company’s work on AI tools.
“I do think it is a good thing to focus on AI,” Ali Mogharabi, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar, told CNN of Zuckerberg’s comments. Mogharabi said Meta’s investments in AI “has benefits on both ends” because it can improve efficiency for engineers creating products, and because incorporating AI features into Meta’s lineup of apps will potentially create more engagement time for users, which can then drive advertising revenue.
And in the long run, Mogharabi said, “A lot of the investments in AI, and a lot of enhancements that come from those investments in AI, could actually be applicable to the entire metaverse project.”
But Zuckerberg’s emphasis on investing in AI, and using the buzzy technology’s tools to make the company more efficient and boost its bottom line, is also “what the shareholders and the market want to hear,” Mogharabi said. Many investors had previously griped at the company’s metaverse ambitions and spending. In 2022, Meta lost more than $13.7 billion in its “Reality Labs” unit, which houses its metaverse efforts.
And investors appear to welcome Zuckerberg’s shift in focus from the metaverse to efficiency. After taking a beating in 2022, shares for Meta have surged more than 50% since the start of the year.
Angelo Zino, a senior equity analyst at CFRA Research, said on Tuesday that the second round of layoffs at Meta “officially make us convinced that Mark Zuckerberg has completely switched gears, altering the narrative of the company to one focused on efficiencies rather than looking to grow the metaverse at any cost.”
