Meta's Monkey Balancing: Executives Given Stock Options, Workers Laid Off

Meta Platforms is cutting nearly 1,000 jobs across teams while simultaneously rolling out one of the most aggressive executive stock option plans seen in Big Tech.

According to a report by Bloomberg, the company is laying off roughly 1,000 employees across divisions including Reality Labs, recruiting, sales and parts of Facebook. The job cuts come as Meta pivots sharply toward artificial intelligence.

While lay-offs catch attention anyway, this one is peculiar. The reports of lay-off surfaced just hours after Meta disclosed a new stock option programme for six top executives. These stock options could raise individual compensation by as much as $921 million over five years if the company's market value rises to $9 trillion within the decade.

The plan is the first such option grant for Meta's top brass since the company went public in 2012 as Facebook. Meta's current market capitalisation is about $1.5 trillion. To unlock even the lowest tranche of the options, the stock would have to rise more than 88 per cent from recent levels. The most aggressive tranche would require Meta's valuation to climb past $9 trillion by 2031, a figure that would far exceed today's most valuable company, Nvidia.

Significantly, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is not part of this programme. Executives eligible for the options include CFO Susan Li, CTO Andrew Bosworth, product chief Chris Cox, COO Javier Olivan, president Dina Powell McCormick and chief legal officer Curtis Mahoney, regulatory filings cited by Reuters show. In addition, most of them will receive enhanced restricted stock awards worth about $170 million in total.

Meta has defended the move, saying the incentives are designed to retain leadership talent as the company makes a high-stakes transition into the AI era. A company spokesperson told Reuters the packages are a "big bet" that will only pay off if Meta delivers "massive future success" for shareholders.

Reality Labs Shrinks As AI Spending Surges

The layoffs have disproportionately affected Reality Labs, the division responsible for virtual reality and metaverse hardware. Reality Labs has reportedly cost Meta more than $80 billion over the years, according to The New York Times. Notably, this is the second round of cuts in the unit this year, after about 1,000 roles were eliminated in January.

Some affected employees are being offered internal roles, in certain cases requiring relocation. Meta has increasingly signalled that its future lies less in virtual worlds and more in artificial intelligence. Earlier, Zuckerberg has publicly spoken about building "superintelligence" and has hired aggressively for AI research, spending billions to attract top talent and acquire AI startups, according to the Bloomberg report.

At the same time, costs are ballooning. Meta has projected spending between $162 billion and $169 billion in 2026, largely on AI infrastructure such as data centres. The company has also reportedly delayed the release of a new AI model after it failed internal performance tests, underscoring the technical and financial risks of the pivot.