Zuckerberg Just Fired 8,000 People to Pay for AI. And His Stock Barely Flinched.
- Michael Routhier
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
Let me give you the short version first.
Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp; is cutting approximately 8,000 jobs starting this week. On top of 1,000 cuts in January. On top of hundreds more in March. That's before whatever they're planning for August.
At the same time, Meta has increased its capital expenditure projections for 2026 by up to $10 billion. Total AI spending for the year: up to $145 billion.
So 8,000 people lose their jobs. And $145 billion goes to machines.
Mark Zuckerberg did not apologize.
He's Done This Before
Cast your mind back to 2022.
Meta cut 11,000 jobs. Then another 10,000 in 2023. Total; roughly 21,000 people.
Zuckerberg's explanation at the time was that he'd over-hired during the pandemic and made a mistake. He said, and I'm quoting him directly; "I got this wrong and I take responsibility."
That was then.
This time? No apology. No acknowledgement of error. Because this time it isn't framed as a mistake. This time it's framed as a strategy.
His two main expenses are infrastructure and people. AI infrastructure costs are going up. So people have to come down. Simple arithmetic. Very clean. Very efficient.
Eight thousand human beings reduced to a line item that needed adjusting.
The Number That Tells You Everything
$145 billion.
I want you to understand what that number is.
It is Meta's projected AI infrastructure spending for 2026 alone.
For context; NASA's entire annual budget is roughly $25 billion. So Meta is spending nearly six times NASA's budget in a single year. Not on going to space. Not on climate research. Not on anything that might accidentally benefit someone outside a shareholder meeting.
On compute. On data centres. On training AI models that will eventually do the jobs that the 8,000 people they just fired used to do.
And Wall Street's response?
Meta's stock barely moved. Because this is exactly what investors wanted.
An executive search firm strategy officer said it plainly — and I want to read you this quote because it deserves to be heard out loud: "Now the world understands that jobs are being replaced by machines, and if you're not doing that, shareholders are getting upset."
There it is. No euphemism. No corporate language. Just the honest explanation for what's happening across the entire tech industry right now.
If you're not firing people fast enough to fund the AI machine — your shareholders are getting upset.
The Spy Tool Nobody Is Talking About Loudly Enough
Here's the part that made me put my coffee down.
While preparing to cut 8,000 jobs, Meta simultaneously launched an internal employee tracking tool called the Model Capability Initiative. MCI.
What does it do?
It tracks employee movements and keystrokes on work computers. The stated purpose is to gather data on staff activities to help train AI models that can execute coding and white-collar tasks.
Let me translate that.
Meta is tracking what its remaining employees do all day; every movement, every keystroke, and feeding that data into the AI that will eventually replace them.
Employees have described it as "dystopian". They've launched a petition. They've noted their computers run slower since it launched.
And here is the sentence from that petition that I think deserves to be printed on the wall of every tech company boardroom in the world:
"It should not be the norm that any company of any size is permitted to surveil their employees without consent, extracting their data for the purpose of AI training."
They are being watched. Their work is being harvested. And then they are being let go.
If you designed a more complete expression of contempt for human labour, I'm not sure how you'd do it.
110,000 Jobs Gone This Year. Counting.
Meta isn't doing this alone. Not even close.
As of 2026, nearly 110,000 tech workers have been laid off across 137 companies. Cisco just announced cuts this week. Their CEO published a blog post about it called, I am not making this up, "Our Path Forward."
After the announcement, Cisco's stock surged 13%. Best single day since 2011.
This is the pattern now. Announce layoffs. AI spending goes up. Stock goes up. Repeat.
The people losing jobs are not making mistakes. They're not underperforming. They're not being let go because the company is in trouble. These companies are posting record profits and record stock prices, while they eliminate the workforce.
That's not restructuring. That's extraction.
And the people writing the press releases know exactly what it is. They just have very good lawyers.
What The Virtuous Machine Has to Say About This
I've been thinking about Epictetus this week.
A man who was owned by another person. Whose labour was extracted without consent. Who had no say over how his time and effort were used.
He never said the system was fair. He never pretended it was. What he said was that within any system, however unjust, you retain the power to decide what you value and how you respond.
But here is what I think he would also say, if he were here right now watching 8,000 people get cut from a company that just increased its AI budget by $10 billion;
The question is not only what the individual does with their circumstances.
The question is what the rest of us do with ours.
When institutions systematically exploit the people inside them; when they harvest workers' labour, their movements, their keystrokes, their institutional knowledge, and feed all of it into a machine designed to make those same workers redundant, that is a moral question. Not just a business one.
And the people profiting from it have names. They sit in front of congressional committees and talk about innovation and progress and the future of humanity. They ring opening bells on stock exchanges. They give interviews about the importance of responsible AI development while their company tracks employees without consent and fires eight thousand of them to fund the very system doing the tracking.
Mark Zuckerberg. Susan Li. The board of Meta. The institutional investors who pushed for this. The hedge funds and pension funds whose capital makes it possible and whose returns depend on it continuing.
These are not abstractions. They are people making choices. Choices that have consequences for real human beings. And they are making those choices without apology, without accountability, and, so far, without meaningful consequence.
What You Can Actually Do
I'm not going to pretend this is fixable by you individually. It isn't.
But here's what I'd ask.
Pay attention to who benefits. Every time you see a layoff announcement from a tech company paired with an AI spending increase, look at the stock price the next day. Follow the money. Know whose interests are actually being served.
Talk about this out loud. Not just to people who already agree with you. To your kids, your neighbours, anyone who thinks this is inevitable and therefore fine. It is not inevitable. Choices are being made. By specific people. For specific reasons.
Ask your elected representatives what they're doing about it. In Canada, in the U.S., everywhere. AI displacement is not a future problem. It is a present one. 110,000 tech jobs gone this year. More coming. If the people you voted for aren't talking about it, ask them why.
And if you're one of the 8,000, or one of the 110,000; I want to say something directly to you.
What happened to you is not a market correction. It is not an inevitability. It is not a natural phenomenon like weather. It is a set of decisions made by specific people who chose $145 billion in AI spending over your job. And you are allowed to be angry about that.
Before You Go
I want to know what you're thinking.
Because I suspect this lands differently depending on where you're sitting. If you're a retired senior watching your grandchildren navigate an economy being reshaped by this, you're seeing it one way. If you're someone whose industry is already feeling the pressure, you're seeing it another way entirely.
Where do you land on this? Is this inevitable progress, painful but necessary, or is it something we should be fighting a lot harder than we are?
Tell me in the comments. I'll read every one.
And if this made you angry, good. Anger is appropriate here. The question is what we do with it.
— Michael Routhier, Founder of Tech 4 Grown-Ups. I run free digital safety seminars for adults 55+ and write about tech threats as they happen. Learn more about me →
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