Meta's first-wave layoffs hit T-12 today on a May 20 start date that California WARN Act filings have made specific: 124 positions at the Burlingame office effective May 22, 74 at Sunnyvale effective May 29. [1] The paper's Thursday brief at T-13 framed the warrant, the layoff, and the capex as a single balance-sheet rewrite; Friday's T-12 carries the frame closer to execution.

The total is 8,000 layoffs from a 78,865-person workforce plus roughly 6,000 cancelled open roles — about 14,000 positions removed — at the same company that approved an AMD warrant for 160 million shares struck at $0.01, vesting on a six-gigawatt MI450 deployment ladder through 2031, against $115–135 billion in FY26 AI capex, with CTO Andrew Bosworth's "AI builder/AI pod lead" titles now public and the Janelle Gale memo language — "letting go of people who have made meaningful contributions" — as the operative HR register. [1] [2]

One balance sheet pays for $0.01-strike compute warrants over a 6-gigawatt MI450 deployment ladder while writing off 14,000 jobs in the same fiscal year — the AMD vest hits a $600-per-share strike target by 2031, and Meta's effective compute-per-employee ratio is the rewrite the layoff calendar is executing. Twelve days to execution; the arithmetic is the disclosure.

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco