I saw this in various news sites.

Years ago, I used to think that Zuckerberg was a genius. He went to Harvard and started FB and became a billionaire. But then when he began to pimp "Metaverse", I was not so sure. According to him, people in the future would wear his scifi goggles all hours of the day and communicate with others in a metaverse - that he controls of course. He spent billions on this. Until I guess he realized he was wasting money and so jumped on the AI bandwagon and is now pouring billions on that.

If I could predict that the Metaverse was a dumb idea, I am amazed that Zuck could not.
But that is a separate issue, his company his business.

What I am concerned about is that he laid off people in the Bay Area, is he going to replace them with H1B slaves? If he does, he needs to be tariffed so bad that his pants fall off. The more he hires overseas, the more he should be tariffed. Why? Because he has his company in the US and is taking but not contributing. Without everyone contributing, the country will collapse. Now some will say he is paying taxes. Well, not enough. Pay more.


Meta cuts more than 1,000 in Bay Area tech's first big layoff of 2026
https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/meta-layoff-1000-first-2026-21293134.php

Quote:

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Meta is laying off more than 1,000 workers, signaling a partial retreat from the company's much-derided metaverse ambitions.

The layoff, the Bay Area tech industry's first big job cut of 2026, was announced Tuesday morning in an internal post from Meta's chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, according to a Bloomberg report that Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton confirmed to SFGATE. The cuts won't touch Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp; they're within Meta's Reality Labs arm, an operation that's poured investment into the "metaverse" idea and also sells the company's virtual reality headsets and Ray-Ban glasses.

"We said last month that we were shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward Wearables," Clayton wrote in an emailed statement. "This is part of that effort, and we plan to reinvest the savings to support the growth of wearables this year."

As of Tuesday at 9:15 a.m., the Menlo Park company had not filed a WARN document with California officials announcing the local scope of the layoffs.

Meta's pullback from its metaverse goals has been a long time coming. When Mark Zuckerberg changed his company's name from Facebook in October 2021, he expounded on the idea of a virtual world where people could work, learn, play and shop together, calling it an "embodied internet where you're in the experience, not just looking at it."

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I think he's a bright guy who invented some cool things but as he gets older his ideas get further and further away from what people want.
The Metaverse was a big (and expensive) swing and a miss.

Meta is lucky they sit on mountains of cash to cover for their monumentally incompetent leadership.

An Aggie friend of mine got hit in this layoff yesterday, he's on the developer side of things so hopefully he can land in another place soon.

Also, he wasn't in the Bay Area if that makes a difference.

infinity ag said:

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I saw this in various news sites.

Years ago, I used to think that Zuckerberg was a genius. He went to Harvard and started FB and became a billionaire. But then when he began to pimp "Metaverse", I was not so sure. According to him, people in the future would wear his scifi goggles all hours of the day and communicate with others in a metaverse - that he controls of course. He spent billions on this. Until I guess he realized he was wasting money and so jumped on the AI bandwagon and is now pouring billions on that.

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I saw this movie. It's called "Gamer", starring Michael C Hall (Dexter) and Gerard Butler.

The main social media platform on the planet being run by one of the most socially unusual individuals on the planet is not a good thing.

Rapier108 said:

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Not everything is about H1B.

Their Metaverse and other adventures have been money pits from the word go. He thought the Metaverse would become the OASIS from Ready Player 1 and it blew up in his face.

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If they have a single H1B, its a problem though.

Flower Child said:

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The main social media platform on the planet being run by one of the most socially unusual individuals on the planet is not a good thing.

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All humans are flawed, so it can never be any other way. Same with gov, thats why gov all over the world for the entire history of the world ends badly.

So your point is irrelevant.

They should learn to code…

lb3 said:

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Zuck is a smart guy but he's never had an original thought in his life. Facebook was not his idea. He basically stole the concept. They bought Instagram so that wasn't his doing either.

He has a serious inferiority complex as a result and tried pimping the Metaverse to build something that was truly his and failed. If not for Instagram being such a cash cow, his company would have eventually been gobbled up by Google.

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That's ok.
Elon didn't invent the Tesla either. But he knew to back it. A lot of billionaires got rich because they know when to back someone else's good idea (Bill Gates vs Apple), or get out of one when it was at it's zenith (Mark Cuban)

Metaverse is a disaster though.

Rapier108 said:

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Not everything is about H1B.

Their Metaverse and other adventures have been money pits from the word go. He thought the Metaverse would become the OASIS from Ready Player 1 and it blew up in his face.

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True, but I don't trust them. It may be about H1B.

After laying off 1000 here, I don't want him to file for 10000 H1Bs. These crooks are known to do that.

What he does with Sheetverse is his problem. He invested, investors invested and it was a major flop as expected. It's his problem and not mine.

Where it becomes OUR problem is if he lays off here and hires there. If he wants to do that, he can GTFO there.

BTKAG97 said:

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infinity ag said:

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I saw this in various news sites.

Years ago, I used to think that Zuckerberg was a genius. He went to Harvard and started FB and became a billionaire. But then when he began to pimp "Metaverse", I was not so sure. According to him, people in the future would wear his scifi goggles all hours of the day and communicate with others in a metaverse - that he controls of course. He spent billions on this. Until I guess he realized he was wasting money and so jumped on the AI bandwagon and is now pouring billions on that.

---

I saw this movie. It's called "Gamer", starring Michael C Hall (Dexter) and Gerard Butler.

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Scary. But he wanted this future.

He should have quit while he was ahead

deddog said:

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lb3 said:

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Zuck is a smart guy but he's never had an original thought in his life. Facebook was not his idea. He basically stole the concept. They bought Instagram so that wasn't his doing either.

He has a serious inferiority complex as a result and tried pimping the Metaverse to build something that was truly his and failed. If not for Instagram being such a cash cow, his company would have eventually been gobbled up by Google.

---

That's ok.
Elon didn't invent the Tesla either. But he knew to back it. A lot of billionaires got rich because they know when to back someone else's good idea (Bill Gates vs Apple), or get out of one when it was at it's zenith (Mark Cuban)

Metaverse is a disaster though.

---

I still think Zuck is a smart guy though I cannot explain his stupid Metaverse plans. I am nowhere as successful as he is and even I could tell right away that it won't work. I am sure many here also could see it. Why couldn't Zuck? Maybe it was the sunk cost fallacy and he got lucky that AI came along and he was able to distract the investors as he slowly wound down Metaverse? That seems to be what a sneaky CEO would do.

CEOs today only cater to Wall Street. Steve Jobs was probably the last guy who cared about making good products. I know someone who works for Microsoft and she tells me that all their CEO Nadella cares about is how the stock is doing. So he takes short term decisions that look good (for now). He took in a lot of H1Bs and made them use AI to work on Windows 11 which is a crappy product full of bugs.

I don't think full Virtual Reality will ever be a thing outside of the gaming/entertainment world. Augmented Reality on the other hand has huge potential.

I saw a demo at work a few years ago where we were given a procedure to follow that involved opening and closing valves and various other mechanism manipulations for the very first time.

They put the procedures into the augmented reality glasses and it was pretty wild. If you were looking in the wrong area for a part, an arrow in your peripheral vision would point you to that part. Words in the glasses would tell you your next step, and animations would momentarily replace the valves you were looking at letting you know which way to turn the handles. Those using the augmented reality system completed the procedures in a third of the time as first time users with paper procedures. And they were nearly as fast as when an 'expert' was telling and pointing at what to do.

I could see infinite uses and efficiency improvements a system like that could have in an industrial setting.

But AI and robotics are advancing fast enough we may skip Augmented Reality entirely.

lb3 said:

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I don't think full Virtual Reality will ever be a thing outside of the gaming/entertainment world. Augmented Reality on the other hand has huge potential.

I saw a demo at work a few years ago where we were given a procedure to follow that involved opening and closing valves and various other mechanism manipulations for the very first time.

They put the procedures into the augmented reality glasses and it was pretty wild. If you were looking in the wrong area for a part, an arrow in your peripheral vision would point you to that part. Words in the glasses would tell you your next step, and animations would momentarily replace the valves you were looking at letting you know which way to turn the handles. Those using the augmented reality system completed the procedures in a third of the time as first time users with paper procedures. And they were nearly as fast as when an 'expert' was telling and pointing at what to do.

I could see infinite uses and efficiency improvements a system like that could have in an industrial setting.

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I agree.

The tech by itself is good and has good use cases. But the idiot and control freak in Zuck thinks he can make everyone wear those glasses every day all the time. It has work related uses also but for specific tasks.

I am in tech but I don't like being connected all the time. Even my phone is kept elsewhere whike at home.

You misunderstand the trend here?

The Metaverse workforce is very high salary and expensive even for the bay area. The company needs to shut down that unprofitable unit. The dollars saved will get re-allocated elsewhere, very likely into AI efforts which is again very expensive.

Separately, The top US tech employers in terms of numbers (especially in Software) are freezing headcount in the US and hiring in lower cost regions.

The US tech sector continues losing jobs—overall, employment decreased by 5k last month and is down 19k over the last year

That's not as bad as the worst of the 2024 tech-cession, but extremely bad compared to the 2022 boom or even pre-2020 norms pic.twitter.com/3hnuGbHz4h

— Joey Politano 🏳️‍🌈 (@JosephPolitano) January 9, 2026

This is downstream of all the remote work tools created as a result of the pandemic. Software can be written from anywhere given the tools today. These companies are not fools, they are seeing equivalent talent available cheaper outside the country.

infinity ag said:

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Rapier108 said:

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Not everything is about H1B.

Their Metaverse and other adventures have been money pits from the word go. He thought the Metaverse would become the OASIS from Ready Player 1 and it blew up in his face.

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True, but I don't trust them. It may be about H1B.

After laying off 1000 here, I don't want him to file for 10000 H1Bs. These crooks are known to do that.

What he does with Sheetverse is his problem. He invested, investors invested and it was a major flop as expected. It's his problem and not mine.

Where it becomes OUR problem is if he lays off here and hires there. If he wants to do that, he can GTFO there.

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Crooks? How so? What has any of "these crooks" done that is illegal?

I never had a client with the kind of money Zuckerberg has, but many in the $50 million to $300 million in net worth range. Almost all of them, once they had hit plenty of home runs doing what got them there, would branch off into stuff probably best left alone. But with cash flowing, and no end in sight, they would take the risk. I have been trying to recall when doing that paid off for any of them, and so far I am drawing a blank. Could be overlooking one I guess.

On occasions like that, the office conversation would generally be us asking ourselves a question "when is enough, enough?" By the time they reached this level, they all lived in a nice house (but none of them in a home worth more than $400,000 to $500,000, and often much less), most had a ranch and some had more than one, they tended to buy new vehicles every two or three years, but other than that, none spent like a wildman. We always figured if they kept doing what they had been doing, they would always have more money than they could ever expect to spend, tens of millions more, but then they got to where they were by taking chances, it wasn't their mindset to rest on their laurels I guess. Maybe that is why Zuckerberg did what he did. Though it turned out to not be a good thing, he won't miss the money he threw away.

Meta - 80K US employees, 1K are released from a money losing unit, and OP sees H1Bs/offshore in almost every scenario and most of his posts.

OP has 1400 views and not a single star. I don't see the point, tbh, but it's almost to the point where I begin to root for H1Bs.

And few have as much contempt for the practice than I, although H1B is better than offshoring or AI, which are the other "economic" alternatives -- if you are chiefly concerned with employing US citizens.