Facebook, Twitter boot staff to maintain balance

Meta; the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp fired 11, 000 workers in a single day after reporting its biggest one-day loss on Wall Street in early February when the company’s worth plummeted by over 26% or about $230 billion.

Another tech behemoth, Twitter also had to lay off half of the company’s employees, pointing at fast depleting revenue and hinting at possible bankruptcy.

Twitter was acquired by tech billionaire, Elon Musk, after a controversial deal partially pulled through with threats and mediation.

With the acquisition of Twitter, Elon Musk is building an innovative global telecommunication company that would include Starlinks satellite telephony which is being facilitated by orbital transmission facilities launched by SpaceX.

However, the acquisition of Twitter brought along the controversies associated with the celebrity businessman who has forever been critical of Facebook. Elon Musk is strongly associated with other US billionaires including former President Donald Trump and celebrity music and fashion icon, Kanye West, who is currently receiving social bashing for his pro-white, anti-black and anti-Semitic rants.

Aggregation of negative backlash on the three celebrities who have been on the back book of social media platforms for caustic social comments began to take tolls on Twitter after Musk took over the company and fired its management team, leading to mass exit of other celebrities from the platform and causing revenue losses.

It was reported Sunday that new Twitter CEO Elon Musk has fired more than three-quarters of the company’s workers in an attempt to stem spiraling losses. Content moderators and developer teams were among the 4,400 of Twitter’s 5,500 to have lost their jobs up to yesterday, according to Platformer.

The firebrand Tesla boss has said that “bankruptcy isn’t out of the question” and that the company sheds around $4 million every single day.

“We just definitely need to bring in more cash than we spend. If we don’t do that and there’s a massive negative cash flow, then bankruptcy is not out of the question,” Elon Musk reportedly informed staff of Twitter on Saturday.

On the other side, the New York Times reports that Meta subsequently decided to reduce its workforce by 13% and freeze new hiring after the trillion-dollar corporation founded by Mark Zuckerberg with quarterly profits further dropping to 50% and stocks dropping in value by more than 70%.

For Meta, the quarterly loss would be the biggest loss of value for a single US conglomerate in the history of Wall Street, the $230 billion value drop is worth roughly the entire GDP of Portugal.

With Zuckerberg’s company, it seems like a mix of the failure of the Metaverse to catch on and increased scrutiny on data privacy affecting Meta’s ad revenue.

Things were looking better for Meta at the beginning of 2022 after going through a rough patch. Meta reported an increase in revenues, users, and stock value during its first quarter of 2022 that exceeded the forecast of experts, according to Al Jazeera. 

In total, Forbes reported, Meta had a profit of $7.4 billion or a drop of 21% from the first quarter of 2021.

Following revenue crisis impacted by new privacy regulations in Europe, Meta had threatened to pull Facebook and Instagram from the European Union over data regulations.

According to Investopedia, 97% of Meta revenues comes from advertising, which it manages to sell by targeting very focused demographic groups. The more they know about you, the more profit can be made.

Meanwhile, according to Bloomberg, an ongoing dispute with EU regulators puts at risk the chance to continue transferring data back to the United States.

Facebook had reported in February that it was losing users globally for the first time as younger generation of netizens migrate their accounts to China’s video based Tik Tok.