Meta cut roughly 8,000 jobs this year — about ten percent of a division — and dressed it up the way they always do: getting disciplined, freeing up resources for the AI bet, tough choices nobody wanted to make. Except in the same stretch of months the company authorized another forty billion dollars to buy back its own stock, and burned through more than seventeen billion of it in a single quarter. So the money was there. It was sitting right there the whole time. It just wasn’t earmarked for the people who got walked out by security.
Here’s what a buyback actually does, because they count on you not knowing. The company takes its cash and spends it purchasing its own shares off the open market. That shrinks the number of shares floating around, which mechanically pushes up the price of every one that’s left. And who’s holding the biggest stack of those shares? The executives whose entire compensation is rigged to the stock price. So the cash that could have kept eight thousand families paid instead went straight into making the people who signed the layoff notices wealthier. That isn’t a glitch in the system. That is the system, working exactly as built.
What kills me is the scarcity act. There’s never any money when it’s your paycheck on the table — the budget’s tight, the market’s soft, everyone has to sacrifice. Then the second the beneficiary is a shareholder instead of a worker, forty billion dollars materializes out of thin air. So the next time a CEO stands at a podium and tells you the company simply can’t afford to keep you, understand that there’s no shortage anywhere in the building. There’s a choice he already made about whose hands the cash lands in. You keep losing that vote because you don’t own enough of the company to count, and they would very much like to keep it that way.