So does Zuckerberg. But while he and Page/Brin may have a controlling interest in _voting_ stock, they own a much smaller amount of overall shares. Sure, activists can't control the board, and Zuck/Page/Brin are not in danger of being ousted, their fiduciary duty is to the shareholders not just those with voting rights.
Facebook, nor Google, is firing people because of activist investors. They're firing them because they just way over hired people recently, and they have way too many people for what they can adequately put to good use given their size now.
Feels like everyone wants to put a semi "conspiratorial" twist on these announcements when it's pretty obvious what the underlying driver is.
> They're firing them because they just way over hired people recently, and they have way too many people for what they can adequately put to good use given their size now.
I'm not sure that's the case. They didn't hire just to have people twiddle their thumbs, but rather to engage on projects they believe may have some worth. But when the share price drops, investors/Wall Street/media start clamoring for "action", and an easy action is to trim those projects that may or may not work out and that aren't core. But it's not like Meta/Google/Msft are in danger of losing money any time soon -- they're still making $Bs in profit every quarter, but the expectations continue to rise as people buy the stock and expect it to keep going up.
You’re way overestimating the amount of clarity and thought in hiring plans during panic hiring like we had.
Management was overwhelmed and just spending money on anything plausible sounding (even if not really plausible) because they could.
Now there is an accounting happening, and the BS is being found out, and here we are.
Also, new hires have been extremely difficult to onboard (or figure out if they are stuck or not) with remote work, making many of these folks only clearly ‘problems’ a year or so later.
> Management was overwhelmed and just spending money on anything plausible sounding (even if not really plausible) because they could
This is the crux of it. At any company there are always more projects and ideas than there are people to work on them. Limits on hiring force the business to carefully choose what to work on. Not every pet project gets staffed/funded.
The underlying driver is also wage suppression. Why retain overpaid employees when you can collectively fire people and suppress the market wages? The added benefit would be that the rest would work twice as hard.
I think tech is laying people off for the same reason activist investors are so active.
As interest rates increase, more investment money is leaving the stock market and entering the bond market. Companies have to sell their stock harder than ever before. This is part of their strategy to sell their stock to investors.
there's no fiduciary duty to do a dumb thing just because Amazon did the same dumb thing, and saying "we've got loads of cash, we're going to expand and hire the great people Amazon and Meta just stupidly let go and enhance shareholder value in the long term" is a perfectly cromulant thing to say.
Fiduciary duty is more what you call guidelines than rules. It’s there to a) prevent blatant fraud; misguided/rash/anti-shareholder-sentiment decisions are not prosecutable, and b) give a board a reason to oust someone. The former requires a paper trail along the lines of “I’m liking my own pockets at the expense of other shareholders”, and as you said the latter is not a danger for them.
