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Meta Lays Off 700 Employees, While Rewarding Top Executives

"The jobs cuts and a new stock program for executives come as Meta continues to shift its focus to artificial intelligence.

March 25, 2026

The layoffs are a fraction of the tech giant’s 78,000 employees, but are part of a shift toward A.I.Jason Henry for The New York Times

The layoffs are a fraction of the tech giant’s 78,000 employees, but are part of a shift toward A.I.Jason Henry for The New York Times

By Eli Tan

Reporting from San Francisco

Meta on Wednesday laid off around 700 employees, a person with knowledge of the company said, the latest downsizing as the Silicon Valley giant shifts its priorities toward artificial intelligence.

Less than 24 hours earlier, the company unveiled a new stock program for six top executives that could increase compensation for some of them by as much as $921 million each over the next five years. Meta said the move was a way to retain talent in the A.I. era and push it toward ambitious growth.

The dichotomy — cutting some employees while rewarding high-ranking executives — underlines how much A.I. has changed the tech industry. In recent years, Meta has been trying to move beyond its social media and metaverse businesses. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has declared that he is striving to create “superintelligence,” or a godlike A.I. that can act as the ultimate personal companion.

Last year, Mr. Zuckerberg shelled out billions of dollars to hire a team of A.I. specialists. At the same time, the company planned to cut 10 percent to 15 percent of Reality Labs, its division making virtual reality and metaverse products.

The latest layoffs compounded a tough day for Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. A Los Angeles jury on Wednesday found the company liable for harming a young user with addictive design features on Instagram in a bellwether case that could open social media companies to more lawsuits over users’ well-being.

While the verdict was coming in, Meta was also announcing the 700 layoffs in the Reality Labs unit, as well as some in recruiting, sales and Facebook, a person with knowledge of the matter said. The layoffs were a fraction of the tech giant’s 78,000 employees, but signal Meta’s priorities.

“Teams across Meta regularly restructure or implement changes to ensure they’re in the best position to achieve their goals,” a Meta spokesman said in a statement. “Where possible, we are finding other opportunities for employees whose positions may be impacted.”

The layoffs were earlier reported by The Information.

Before the job cuts, Meta shared details of its new stock program for six top executives. They were Andrew Bosworth, the chief technology officer; Chris Cox, the chief product officer; Susan Li, its chief financial officer; Javier Olivan, the chief operating officer; Dina Powell McCormick, the president and vice chairman; and C.J. Mahoney, the company’s chief legal officer.

The program allows the executives to buy additional Meta stock options if the company hits certain growth targets. The most aggressive target is for Meta to become a $9 trillion company by 2031. Its current market capitalization stands at around $1.5 trillion.

If it achieves the goals, the new stock options for some of the executives — such as Mr. Bosworth, Mr. Cox and Mr. Olivan — would be worth as much as $921 million each, according to an analysis by Equilar, a compensation research firm. Ms. Li’s stock options would be worth as much as $161 million, the firm said.

It was the first time Meta gave executives stock options since it went public in 2012, when the company was named Facebook. In a statement, Meta said the program was meant to keep the company competitive with A.I. rivals and incentivize executives. Mr. Zuckerberg was not given new stock options.

“This is a big bet,” a Meta spokesman said in a statement. “These pay packages will not be realized unless Meta achieves massive future success, benefiting all of our shareholders.”

Meta has forecast that it will spend at least $115 billion this year, primarily on A.I., including on the construction of new data centers to power the technology. Mr. Zuckerberg has also said that A.I. will change how employees work, with A.I. tools allowing fewer employees to get more work done.

“I think 2026 is going to be the year that A.I. starts to dramatically change the way that we work,” he said on a call with investors in January. “We’re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person.”

Eli Tan covers the technology industry for The Times from San Francisco."

  

Meta and YouTube Found Negligent in Landmark Social Media Addiction Case

A jury found the companies harmed a young user with design features that were addictive and led to her mental health distress.

March 25, 2026  Updated 3:37 p.m. ET

Meta’s chairman and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, at Los Angeles Superior Court last month.Mark Abramson for The New York Times

By Cecilia KangRyan Mac and Eli Tan

Cecilia Kang reported from Washington, Ryan Mac from the California Superior Court in Los Angeles County and Eli Tan from San Francisco.

Sign up for the On Tech newsletter.   Get our best tech reporting from the week.

The social media company Meta and the video streaming service YouTube harmed a young user with design features that were addictive and led to her mental health distress, a jury found on Wednesday, a landmark decision that could open social media companies to more lawsuits over users’ well-being.

Meta and YouTube must pay $3 million in compensatory damages for pain and suffering and other financial burdens. Meta is responsible for 70 percent of that cost and YouTube for the remainder.

The bellwether case, which was brought by a now 20-year-old woman identified as K.G.M., had accused social media companies of creating products as addictive as cigarettes or digital casinos. Citing features like infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendations, K.G.M. sued Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, and Google’s YouTube, claiming they led to anxiety and depression.

The jury of seven women and five men are deliberating further to decide what punitive damages the companies should pay for malice or fraud.

The verdict in K.G.M.’s case — one of thousands of lawsuits filed by teenagers, school districts and state attorneys general against Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap, which owns Snapchat — was a major win for the plaintiffs. The finding validates a novel legal theory that social media sites or apps can cause personal injury. It is likely to factor into similar cases expected to go to trial this year, which could expose the internet giants to further financial damages and force changes to their products.

The personal liability argument draws inspiration from a legal playbook used against Big Tobacco last century, in which lawyers argued that the companies created addictive products that harmed users. The companies have largely dodged legal threats by citing a federal shield, called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which protects them from liability for what their users post.

TikTok and Snap both settled with the plaintiff for undisclosed terms before the trial started.

Wednesday’s verdict follows a ruling this week by a New Mexico jury in another case brought by the state attorney general there, which found Meta liable for violating state law by failing to safeguard users of its apps from child predators. That jury decided on Tuesday that Meta should pay $375 million in that case.

The trial in the California Superior Court in Los Angeles County began last month, with the jury taking more than a week of deliberation to reach its verdict. The $3 million in financial damages are a drop in the bucket for Meta and YouTube’s parent company Google, which bring in billions in revenue every quarter.

But the lawyers, parents and consumer interest groups supporting plaintiffs in other suits hailed the jury’s decision as a major step to rein in social media giants.

“This is the first time in history a jury has heard testimony by executives and seen internal documents that we believe prove these companies chose profits over children,” said Joseph VanZandt, one of K.G.M.’s lawyers.

“We respectfully disagree with the verdict and are evaluating our legal options,” a Meta spokeswoman said.

Google also said it disagreed with the verdict and plans to appeal. “This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site,” said José Castañeda, a Google spokesman.

The cases have been compared to those against Big Tobacco last century, when Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds were accused of hiding information about the harms of cigarettes. The companies reached a $206 billion master settlement with more than 40 states in 1998 that led to an agreement to stop marketing to minors. Strict tobacco regulations and a decline in smoking followed.

Though the California Superior Court of Los Angeles County verdict is an initial victory against tech giants, legal experts said it was unclear if the decision would represent a similar turning point. Eight other cases brought by individual plaintiffs are slated to go to trial there. A set of federal cases brought by states and school districts in Oakland, Calif., at the U.S. District Court of Northern California, are scheduled for jury trials this summer.

“There is a long road ahead, but this decision is quite significant,” said Clay Calvert, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank, and expert on media law. “If there are a series of verdicts for plaintiffs, it will force the defendants to reconsider how they design social media platforms and how they deliver content to minors.”

Concern about social media use has mounted globally. In 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General called for adding warning labels to social media explaining that the platforms were associated with mental health harms for adolescents. In December, Australia barred children under 16 from using social media. Malaysia, Spain and Denmark are considering similar rules.

But most efforts to regulate social media in the United States have failed. K.G.M., whose first name is Kaley, filed her lawsuit in 2023 against Meta, Snap, YouTube and TikTok. Kaley, who lives in Chico, Calif., said she had begun using social media at age 6 and claimed the sites caused personal injury, including body dysmorphia and thoughts of self harm.

Her case, which was presided over by Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl, represented one of the strongest personal injury cases among the thousands of suits filed.

Ahead of the trial, lawyers for the companies argued to the judge that the cases should be dropped, evoking speech protections. Lawyers for the plaintiff countered that the case was about product design, not speech.

While Snap and TikTok settled, lawyers for Meta and YouTube proceeded, saying they had a strong legal defense. It was too hard to prove social media was addictive and caused personal harms, the companies said.

During opening arguments, one of K.G.M.’s lawyers, Mark Lanier, presented the jury internal company documents from Meta and YouTube that showed tech executives knew of and discussed the negative effects of their products on children. Mr. Lanier argued that features like infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendations and auto-play videos were designed to entice and hook young users to compulsively engage with the platforms.

Meta countered that K.G.M.’s mental health issues were caused by familial abuse and turmoil. YouTube argued that it was not a social media company and that its features were not designed to be addictive.

During the five-week trial, K.G.M.’s lawyers grilled Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri. The executives rejected claims that Instagram, which K.G.M. began to use at age 9, could be described as “clinically” addictive.

K.G.M. testified about her childhood and using social media as both a creative outlet and an escape from bullying at school. She spent hours a day on Instagram and posted hundreds of photos using beauty filters to mask her insecurities, which she said led to her body dysmorphia.

On Wednesday, all but two of the jurors found both companies liable, determining that Meta and YouTube were negligent in designing their platforms, and that their products harmed K.G.M. The plaintiff, dressed in a tan sweater and long pink dress, sat in the first row of the public benches and listened intently to the verdict, but showed little emotion.

The jury next heard arguments from Mr. Lanier and representatives for Meta and YouTube on punitive damages.

Mr. Lanier held a jar of M&M’s, saying each piece of candy represented a billion dollars of the companies’ value.

“You can take out a handful and not make a difference,” he said, scooping out a few with his hand. “You can take out two handfuls and not make a difference.”

Meta’s lawyer, Paul Schmidt, suggested that the jury could avoid punitive damages completely. Meta is already on the path toward making changes toward protecting young users, he added.

Luis Li, YouTube’s lawyer, apologized to K.G.M.

“We are sorry for the things you have suffered,” he said. “We at YouTube truly hope there have been things at YouTube that have enriched your life and allowed you to express yourself.”

Mr. Lanier responded by saying “a lawyer apology is not the same as accountability.” He used his teeth to crack off the shell of a single blue M&M.

“This is like $200 million,” he said. “They do not want to feel the pain for what they did.”

Cecilia Kang reports on technology and regulatory policy for The Times from Washington. She has written about technology for over two decades.

Ryan Mac covers corporate accountability across the global technology industry.

Eli Tan covers the technology industry for The Times from San Francisco."

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More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker

“Elon Musk’s plans for Mars do involve more than just dying there. Going to Mars “enables us to backup the biosphere, protecting all life as we know it from a calamity on Earth,” he says, like asteroids, nuclear war, or rogue AI. 60 Or, as he put it on Twitter, “We must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a spacefaring civilization & extending life to other planets.” 61 His preferred plan for doing so involves getting people to Mars—at first a few, and then a lot, with the ultimate plan of sending a million people there by 2050.62 As of this writing, he says he plans to land a SpaceX rocket on Mars by 2029.63 While taking Musk seriously is increasingly difficult—it seems likely that he’ll say and do many bizarre or hurtful things in the months between the writing and publishing of this book—he still has enormous power and influence, and SpaceX is certainly a serious company, at least for now. It is the sole provider of crewed launches on US soil for NASA (as of 2024), its Starlink system is one of the few options for cell service in many truly remote areas, and future versions of SpaceX’s existing Starship launch vehicles could, theoretically, go to Mars. A SpaceX rocket even launched a Tesla out past Mars’s orbit in 2018. Musk’s timeline for Mars is probably too optimistic—over the years he’s given many other dates for boots on Mars and uncrewed landings, and missed them all—but a SpaceX rocket landing on Mars at some point in the next few decades seems like a reasonable possibility. 64 The problem is everything else in Musk’s vision. Space—Mars or otherwise—just isn’t the place. Nobody’s going to boldly go anywhere, not to live out their lives and build families and communities—not now, not soon, and maybe not ever. Consider Mars. It’s fifty-six million kilometers (thirty-five million miles) away at its closest. The most reasonable path there—the route nearly every Mars probe and lander has ever taken—requires about six to nine months in deep space before arriving in orbit around the Red Planet. That’s a long time, longer than all but a few humans have ever spent in space, and far longer than anyone has ever spent beyond low Earth orbit. There’s a good reason for that: venturing beyond low Earth orbit exposes you to massive amounts of dangerous radiation from the Sun (and a smaller amount from deep space). The Sun is a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees in its core. That blistering nuclear heat eventually makes its way to the surface and atmosphere of the Sun, producing visible light, ultraviolet rays, and other kinds of radiation with even higher energies, like x-rays and fast-moving charged particles. There are also cosmic rays, high-energy radiation produced by violent events beyond our solar system. Here on the surface of the Earth, we’re protected from much of this radiation by two mechanisms. The Earth’s magnetic field deflects a large amount of the incoming radiation, and our atmosphere absorbs a good deal of the rest before it arrives at the ground. In low Earth orbit, astronauts lack the protection of our atmosphere, and they can see the results: many astronauts have reported seeing occasional bright flashes in the darkness behind their closed eyelids, produced when high-energy radiation slams into their eyes and optic nerves. But such astronauts still have the protection of Earth’s magnetic field. Not so if they’re on their way to Mars. Astronauts heading into deep space beyond Earth’s orbit invariably receive high doses of background radiation. The Apollo astronauts each received about 0.4 rads, roughly the equivalent of two head CT scans, in the course of their weeklong trips to the Moon. 65 A trip to Mars would be dozens of times longer than that even if it were just one-way. And if a major solar storm hit the spacecraft on its way out, the crew could be exposed to far greater radiation levels than anything the Apollo astronauts experienced. It is possible to shield spacecraft against radiation, but only to a point. Shielding is heavy, which makes it harder to launch the vehicle in the first place. And even heavy shielding can’t stop all forms of radiation from getting through over the course of an eighteen-month round-trip journey through deep space. Bad as it is, radiation is far from the only problem on the journey to Mars. Nine months in close quarters is psychologically taxing even for highly trained astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS)—and they get crew rotations, regular supplies, and real-time communication with the ground. None of that would be possible on a rocket traveling to Mars, which can be up to twenty light-minutes away. Proximity also has other benefits. If anything goes wrong on the ISS, the astronauts can evacuate and be home in a few hours. The astronauts on Apollo 13 only had to wait an excruciating three-and-a-half days before returning home in their crippled spacecraft. On a Mars mission gone awry, help would be months away—or more than a year. Part of the problem is the distance involved, but the orbital mechanics are also difficult. Unlike trips to low Earth orbit or the Moon, Mars launches are only undertaken at certain times, when the two planets are in the right positions relative to each other. That means no rescue in a reasonable amount of time would be possible for a Mars mission in trouble. Even if nothing goes wrong, there’s the dangers of the zero-gravity environment within the spacecraft itself: extended time in zero-g leads to muscle atrophy, bone-density loss, and a variety of other physical ailments. Astronauts coming from extended stays on the ISS have help readjusting to gravity on their return to Earth. But a weakened crew arriving on Mars would have to adapt to gravity without anybody else’s help. Assuming that our intrepid astronauts do make it to Mars in one piece—perhaps with a significantly higher risk of cancer for the rest of their lives, but fine for now—their problems aren’t over. Their radiation exposure isn’t even over. The surface of Mars receives about as much radiation as nearby points in deep space, because Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field and has barely any atmosphere, just 1 percent of Earth’s. The best way to shield yourself from radiation on the surface would be to dig underground, using the Martian rocks and dust to absorb the radiation streaming down from above. But that presents another issue: Martian dust is rich in perchlorates and other toxic chemicals, making it quite poisonous to humans and many other plants and animals of Earth. The good news there is that you’d have to wear an airtight suit even if the dust weren’t dangerous. With such low air pressure, astronauts on the Martian surface would have to wear full space suits at all times. Direct exposure to Martian air would boil the saliva off an astronaut’s tongue while they asphyxiate; toxic dust would be the least of their concerns. (Although, that toxic dust also has a nasty habit of getting into the Martian air. There are massive dust storms on Mars with alarming regularity, with wind speeds of up to 100 kph [60 mph]. Because the atmosphere is so thin, the storms wouldn’t knock astronauts off their feet—The Martian is fiction in more ways than one—but they would make it even harder to avoid the dust.) Space suits would also help protect astronauts from the cold climate on Mars, though compared to the other problems we’ve seen thus far, this isn’t so extreme: the average temperatures near the Martian equator typically range from 0 ° C (32 ° F) to-70 ° C (-94 ° F). 66 So a balmy day on Mars is comparable to a brisk one on Earth, but a brisk day on Mars is as cold as the Antarctic night. And at the Martian poles, it gets far colder than any air temperature ever recorded on Earth, even in Antarctica. These problems are formidable enough. But if you want to live on Mars, rather than just visit for a while, then you have even more problems to handle. Staying on Mars means finding a good source of water, and Mars doesn’t really have that. The whole planet is a desert, and its scarce water is contaminated with poisonous dust and other hazardous compounds. Once you obtain that water, you’ll need to use it to create a closed ecosystem—probably underground, both for radiation shielding and because that’s where much of the water is. That closed ecosystem would need to have plants and microbes (and maybe insects) in order to provide you with the oxygen and food you need to stay alive. In theory, this should work. In practice, nobody has ever done this successfully on a human scale. The highest-profile attempt to create a closed ecosystem with humans in it, Biosphere 2 outside of Tucson, Arizona, had a troubled first mission—oxygen levels dropped steadily over the two years of the experiment—and a second and final mission that ended prematurely. Human factors contributed to the problems there (including the involvement of one Steve Bannon), but it’s clear that properly balancing out an entirely isolated ecosystem is a difficult thing to do. 67 It would be even harder on Mars, where there’s virtually no oxygen in the air, less than half as much sunlight, and no soil. This all presumes that it’s even possible to get the plants and microbes needed for a closed ecosystem to grow properly in Martian gravity, a third of Earth’s. That might be a problem for the humans living there too. We know what extended exposure to zero-g does to humans, and it’s not good. We don’t know what extended low-g does to humans; ultimately, there’s no good way to be sure without conducting highly unethical experiments on humans. And those experiments would look tame compared to the ones you’d need to perform to know whether it’s safe to have a family on Mars. We don’t know what effects living in a low-g environment would have on pregnant people and kids. It’s an open question: it could be fine, it could dramatically shorten their lifespans, or it could kill them. If it’s not fine, the only way around it would be to construct an underground centrifuge on Mars large enough for pregnant people to live in until they give birth, and for children to live in until they grow up. A centrifuge for full-g exercise is a good idea, but would it really be reasonable to condemn pregnant people to live inside of it 24-7 for nine months? Would we leave children in there for twenty years? What would that do to them? Elton John was right: Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids, at least not without information that we can’t get without performing truly horrifying experiments on children. Without that information, raising children off-world seems unethically risky. But merely living on Mars and raising a family there isn’t enough to realize Musk’s dream. He wants a settlement on Mars to be a backup for humanity. That doesn’t just mean a few families, or even a few dozen. If a Mars settlement is going to be a contingency plan for our species in case of a disaster here on Earth, it would need to be fully self-sufficient—as Musk has repeatedly emphasized himself. 68 To do that, you’d need a lot of people. One reason is genetic diversity: in order to prevent dangerous levels of inbreeding and genetic drift among any completely isolated group of people, there would need to be a population of at least a few thousand to start. But self-sufficiency on Mars would require a far larger population than that, because of the technology required to live there. An isolated group of people on Earth can survive with a fairly rudimentary level of technology, as humans did for millennia before the Industrial Revolution and tens of millennia before the development of agriculture. But on Mars, anything but a high-tech society is an instant death sentence. Creating and maintaining the panoply of advanced technology that our society runs on requires a large number of people even here on Earth; Mars wouldn’t need less. So how many people would Mars need for a truly self-sufficient settlement? “One million is actually an absurdly low number of people—far too few to support a modern economy,” writes Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman, in response to Musk’s plans for Mars. “Musk’s comments immediately called to mind for me a great essay by one of my favorite science fiction writers, Charlie Stross, that posed precisely this question: ‘What is the minimum number of people you need in order to maintain (not necessarily to extend) our current level of technological civilization?’” Stross had written on the subject in 2010, concluding that “colonizing Mars might well be practical, but only if we can start out by plonking a hundred million people down there.” “If anything, that’s on the low side,” writes Krugman. Stross agreed—he suggested that the real figure could be as high as a billion people. 69 (Automation won’t solve the problem. You still need people to build and maintain the machines, and the economic base needed for a high-tech society would still be large.) Musk’s goal of a million people on Mars is unrealistic enough. It’s difficult to see how a billion people could live there, and that’s ignoring questions of how you’d get that many people off of Earth in the first place. Taking just a million people to Mars would require a rocket launch with a hundred people on it every day for thirty years. And about 1 percent of rocket launches fail, so without serious improvements to the technology, roughly ten thousand people would be killed along the way, sacrificed to the dreams of a billionaire.” 

 — More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker https://a.co/08hv6WTJ

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