T-13 to May 20. Meta will eliminate approximately 8,000 positions on that date — 10% of its 78,865-person workforce — and has cancelled an additional 6,000 open requisitions, putting the effective headcount reduction at 14,000. [1] Chief People Officer Janelle Gale's April 23 internal memo, first reported by Bloomberg, was confirmed within hours by NPR, CNN, and Reuters. The paper's May 6 standard on the layoff window named the one-restructuring-two-documents frame.

The AMD six-gigawatt MI450 warrant — first vesting tranche in the second half of 2026 — sits inside the same week. Meta's 2026 capex guide is $115 to $135 billion, nearly double 2025's $72.2 billion, with a Louisiana data-center campus, a $1 billion AI-optimized facility in Tulsa, and at least 28 U.S. data centers under construction. [2] Maher Saba's April 14 memo restructured the Applied AI Engineering division under CTO Andrew Bosworth into two new teams. Roles are being relabeled "AI builder," "AI pod lead," "AI org lead." Roughly 1,000 employees have already been moved.

The Model Capability Initiative — Meta tracking and logging employee interactions with work computers to train its AI models — was disclosed to staff the same week as the layoff memo. One employee called it "dystopian." [3] The dataset is being collected from people about to be terminated. Severance is 16 weeks plus two weeks per year of service. The math is the document. [4]

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco