[rsanek]

Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.

[disillusioned]

Yeah, but, just objectively speaking, look at how many _more_ business lines and units and actual PRODUCTS each of those other companies ship in comparison.

Meta has... Facebook. Instagram. Threads, if you want to count it. What'sApp. The ad-tech that powers those things. A black hole of a VR division that has since been eviscerated after billions burned. An AR/device divison that sells glasses. And a burgeoning supernova of an AI division, just one singular hire of which is responsible for $1.5B in pay (over 6 years).

Google/Alphabet has........ an entire consumer hardware family ranging from cameras to doorbells to smart displays to streamers, YouTube, YouTubeTV, Android, Chrome, Google itself, Gemini, GCP, Waymo, GoogleFi, Google Fiber, Ads, Infra/Analytics, Maps, dozens of other apps... on and on.

Microsoft has Azure, Windows, Office (each of which are obviously _suites_ of more complex software), Xbox, LinkedIn, Dynamics, Surface, etc.

If anything, Apple _might_ be a slightly closer analog to Meta in that they're just a bit more limited, but their hardware engineering side is obviously a massive part of that, supply chain, software, MacOS, iOS, all of their adjacent first-party apps, App Store, iCloud, AppleTV, retail...

Meta just... isn't in the same league in terms of pure surface area. Mark just leaned extremely hard into acquiring as much nascent talent as possible and hoped he'd have the use cases to make it make sense but was content to spend the money in the meantime on looking busy. Now that CapEx has to go to compute/DCs/GWs for their AI which... kind of no one wants? But he's going to bet as much of the company as possible to stay relevant and try to be a player in the space. He's just doing it in this tail-wagging-the-dog hyper-overpay-individual-researchers approach that, from the outside at least, seems extremely risky...

[akdev1l]

I am convinced Mark Zuckerberg does more harm than good for Facebook

like literally they lucked out on the landing the business model early but it feels it has been in an ongoing decline and everything else they have tried has failed spectacularly (and particularly things Mark has put his whole weight behind)

They never became anything more than the ad company

[rao-v]

Alright, apart from Instagram, WhatsApp, Llama 1 & 2 and somehow managing to sell nearly 10M less nerdy google glasses what has Zuck done for FB?

[b00ty4breakfast]

Pretty sure they bought Insta and Whatsapp. I mean, that's not nothing, buying a successful business and keeping it successful for over a decade. But neither Zuck nor Meta made those platforms; they were both established successes in their own right before acquisition.

[matwood]

> keeping it successful

I’m no Zuck fan, but he’s done much more than keep them successful, they have grown a lot.

I remember everyone making fun of him for overpaying for IG and WA. Now both in hindsight look like amazing acquisitions.

[alex1138]

The "amazing acquisitions" should be antitrust. Whatsapp is a non starter given what Brian Acton reported. I'll never use it. People widely report they ruined Instagram and Zuck came back furiously explaining in an email chain later "oh sorry I didn't mean to say we're killing the competition" probably after a lawyer scolded him

[hn_throwaway_99]

This is the case with most tech companies. Google bought Android, YouTube, DoubleClick, Maps, etc. etc.

[happymellon]

Although in this case Meta bought companies that were already established and successful.

Google bought Android before it had released products.

Google Maps was purchased, but was Where 2 actually a successful product prior to that?

[stephbook]

Only The Zuck saw the value though. Why didn't MS, Amazon or Google buy insta? Or some Softbank vehicle?

[afavour]

I’m sure the others saw the value too. It just wasn’t worth as much to them as Zuckerberg was prepared to pay. Not surprising given it’s a service that directly competed with FB in the social space.

[b00ty4breakfast]

Probably because Instagram wasn't a direct competitor to any of those other companies (except maybe Google+, which wasn't even a year old at the time that FB bought Instagram). I don't know why softbank didn't get them.

[disgruntledphd2]

Instagram had around 10mn users at acquisition, so they might not have gotten to where they are without FB. Whatsapp was a successful product that didn't make any money.

[eloisant]

They used the Facebook app to spy on smartphone users and detect Instagram and WhatsApp success to decide to buy them.

[qwertybrah]

One step further. Besides Facebook itself whqt has zuck been visionary about ? Instw and WhatsApp was bought. He thought chatbots was the thing in ‘17, then abandoned it for VR and metaverse, all the while chatbots start taking off. Every time he’s in an interview he talks like he’s some savant, really he got lucky with fb and done nothing since

[wjeje]

Let’s go another step further!

The continual success of fb and instagram has not come from zuck but through glorified A/B testing on steroids whilst lighting employee’s asses on fire each quarter to move the metrics. Visionary genius? My ass. Only Steve Jobs proved he is worthy of that title.

Bro is a fraud. He always was - remember he stole the idea for fb. Thankfully he’s getting found out.

[philipnee]

i argue that most ideas aren't necessary novel, so stealing idea isn't necessary bad.... e.g. i don't think google search was entirely novel, but was well executed.

honestly - meta has built quite a lot of cool things, but c-suite is probably to be blamed for what's going on today.

[hyperhello]

Did he really steal the idea? I thought the idea was just a message board for Harvard students. That isn’t novel.

[red_admiral]

Lots of things, but he then chucked all the profits at a stupid idea that he even renamed the company for.

[nomel]

Look at Meta's profits by year.

[Danox]

Meta profits are good but they’re closing in on the $100 billion dollar mark in their Meta Quest/AI fiasco just because you can afford it doesn’t mean you should do it. See another company called Oracle for a similar path.

[philipnee]

build and tear down metaverse. zero sum.

[flir]

The transition to mobile-first was a good call. Probably the last good call though. Oh, and buying Instagram.

[stingraycharles]

And WhatsApp. And the VR glasses seem to be a success.

[lotsofpulp]

And whatsapp.

[Spooky23]

I think it’s hard to not have any kind of boss. There’s nobody to provide the critique needed to improve the products.

[matwood]

> to improve the products.

Meta had ~100B in EBITDA (or 60B in net income) for 2025. What critique does he need from a product/business standpoint?

[dpc050505]

Everyone has clients and if your employees aren't incompetent sycophants they can give you actionable feedback.

[SturgeonsLaw]

Not a commentary on Zuck specifically, but many powerful people with fragile egos build an inner circle of incompetent sycophants

[OccamsMirror]

My favorite story from "Careless People," was when his team let him cheat and ultimately win at Settlers of Catan.

[OccamsMirror]

My favorite story from "Careless People," was when his team let him cheat and ultimately win at Settlers of Catan.

[Danox]

Very true the White House currently is an example of that.

[wjeje]

I mean he’s got boz in his circle - is that short for bozo?

[alper]

The only good things at Meta are the things they bought (Whatsapp and Instagram). They haven't made anything original in a long long time.

[adi_kurian]

Besides selling democracy for pennies on the dollar, Zuckerberg knew what to buy before everyone else knew what it was worth.

In 2012, everyone around me was lauging at the absurdity of a 0 revenue photo app getting acquired for $1bn. My peers/superiors in the ad business thought Facebook would flail in digital marketing. Oops.

The metaverse might be a big pile of bollocks, but isn't the whole point of being a billionaire to indulge peculiar unpopular obsessions?

[wjeje]

No he bought everything out of paranoia to shut out competition.

They tried organically to replicate instagram etc but they failed even though they had wayyyy more resources. Their attempts sucked. So their approach was to target for acquisition or copy features if they couldn’t.

There’s plenty of evidence of this re. His comms around those events.

[breppp]

Only someone who had so much luck in finding a product that clicks, would know the worth of buying such a product

[alex1138]

Zuckerberg copied Snapchat like... 5 times at least? It should have signified to EVERYBODY he has sociopath-like behavior (in fact apparently on the Zuckerberg-owned Instagram, Snapchat content got demoted, or something) and how he is absolutely the same person that was willing to fuck the Winklevosses ("in the ear")

But I suppose that doesn't count because Winklevii "never would have come up with anything anyway"

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21114106

[Rapzid]

Totally. I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that if I had to pick a FAANG to put all my retirement savings into Meta would absolutely not be my pick.

Heck, if I was forced to either short or invest Meta with all my retirement savings now betting on it's value in 25 years.. I'd short it.

[dron57]

Meta is going to have higher ads revenue than Google this year.

[torginus]

Social media is an extremely competitive landscape, with competitors rising overnight.

Google, Apple and Microsoft dominate the world with their products and platforms. Facebook & WhatsApp certainly doesnt.

[John23832]

> Social media is an extremely competitive landscape, with competitors rising overnight.

This is not true at all. There are two players. FB/Instagram and TikTok. Using one does not preclude using the other. Other than tiktok, who was the last new player in social?

> Google, Apple and Microsoft dominate the world with their products and platforms. Facebook & WhatsApp certainly doesnt.

Whole countries literally run on WhatsApp.

[torginus]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_social_pl...

There are all kinds of social media, its segmented by userbase, and culture/geography.

Telegram has 1B users (which is surprising to me, I thought it was an ex-Soviet thing), and there are entire geographic strongholds, such as Russia and China.

Russia and China still use iPhones and Windows, but entirely skipped out on Facebook and Whatsapp.

[tshaddox]

You don’t consider YouTube to be social media?

[drivebyhooting]

I wish WhatsApp would get nationalized. I absolutely hate having to use it.

[canes123456]

That has been the talking point since facebook launched.

[Rapzid]

It's not diversified enough IMHO compared to those other companies. That makes its market cap fragile and vulnerable to disruption.

[alex1138]

I'm convinced all of Meta is fraud though so that's not surprising

[matwood]

> Heck, if I was forced to either short or invest Meta with all my retirement savings now betting on it's value in 25 years.. I'd short it.

Short of social media being classified as something like alcohol or cigarettes, you will lose money on this trade. You’re betting against ingrained human nature.

[loeg]

If you try and hold a short position for 25 years, you will lose all your money, even if you were right.

[seattle_spring]

I'm convinced that 99.9% of folks online who claim they're going to "short a stock" have never actually shorted anything in their life.

[rvz]

> Heck, if I was forced to either short or invest Meta with all my retirement savings now betting on it's value in 25 years.. I'd short it.

Not a good idea. Meta has hundreds of leavers to find more profits from anywhere.

[snitty]

Apple also has an entire international retail arm.

[pembrook]

And an entire desktop OS and desktop software suite in pretty much all categories to compete with Microsoft. Also their hardware business is roughly 50-100X the size of Google's hardware business in scale and distribution.

The headcount analog for Google is Apple. And if you subtract out the retail employees Apple looks surprisingly efficient, having much less non-retail staff than Google (although both heavily use contractors).

Meta on the other hand...is pretty much the definition of bloat.

[jballanc]

It's been more than a few years since I worked at Apple, but they were always unique in the tech space in that their retail division dwarfed headcount. If I recall correctly all of OS X Lion was produced by around 3,000 engineers (and probably less, since I think that count included iLife and iWork).

[bee_rider]

Aren’t they sort of unique in that they… have a retail division, as a real ongoing thing (I’m sure MS tried an MS store but I’ve never seen one).

Well, unique other than Amazon I guess.

[BeetleB]

> And an entire desktop OS and desktop software suite in pretty much all categories to compete with Microsoft.

Not even close, if you include Office and Mail/Outlook. And if you include corporate clients, Apple is just not on the map. I've gone from a Windows first company to an Apple first company, and it's a night and day difference when you see how well integrated things were for Windows.

I mean, individually you can say Teams sucks (terrible, really). And Outlook sucks as a consumer. But the way you can get all these things working with Office was very convenient.

[doublerabbit]

Meta has Facebook which was OG enough. MySpace was the real movement although you could argue LiveJournal was before that. Instagram was bought, WhatsApp was too. So really all Meta has is Facebook, everything else has been synergy.

Apple / Google and as I hate to admit are innovators of the modern tech world. While they've bought their fair-share they still produce and create and have existed prior 00's. Two devices dominate the market and it's not going to change any time soon.

You either use iOS or Google. Urgh, this is how the world has become. Windows or Linux, X or Y; why did Z have to die.

[squiffsquiff]

By this logic you should factor that android was an acquisition, as were YouTube, doubleclick, deepmind and Waze

[doublerabbit]

I forgot about that. Back to the drawing board.

[ekropotin]

Apple innovate in hardware.

What Google innovated during the last decade?

[moosedev]

Apart from the Transformer architecture that enabled the AI boom/singularity/civilization-reshaping-event/whatever-this-is? Not much, I guess...

[slashdave]

> Apple _might_ be a slightly closer analog to Meta in that they're just a bit more limited

Seriously? Walk outside and see what people are holding in their hand.

[screye]

Meta has 4 identical products, most of which have reached feature complete. They do few things, and make absurd amounts of money from it.

Google, MSFT and Apple do a lot more and most of their products have large feature backlogs.

Different scenarios

[lmm]

The only part of Google that makes money is their ads business. And Meta is beating them at it.

[postexitus]

You are wrong. Google makes ~73% of its revenue from ads compared to 98% in Meta.

[canes123456]

Makes money, implies profit and not revenue

[postexitus]

We have revenue breakdown. Where is the profit breakdown?

[squirrellous]

Ha, probably nobody at Google even knows the exact cost of each of those business lines.

[screye]

Google makes money on ads, because its products span the entire internet.

Youtube, Gmail, Search, Maps, Android, Devices, Photos and Drive are how they get the data to make money on ads. Cloud, Android & Youtube would be a 2 trillion dollar company even without Google. They don't make money on these, because they don't need to make money on it.

[oytis]

Apple makes cutting edge hardware, at least two operating systems and lots of user applications. Google makes search, cloud, a decent office suite with the largest mail server in the world and of course cutting edge AI. It's easy to see why either of them needs twice as many people as Meta

[akdev1l]

Also Google has a whole YouTube inside of it

[fragmede]

Whatsapp powers entire economies, outside of North America. And then there's Instagram. If we're going by that reasoning, Meta's undersized.

[clickety_clack]

That’s like saying email powers entire economies. It’s not WhatsApp that’s providing the value there, and if they press to hard to try and pull revenue from it, all that communication would flow into another channel.

[michaelt]

> Whatsapp powers entire economies, outside of North America.

Whatsapp had 55 employees when Facebook brought them for $19 billion.

[oytis]

Neither needs a lot of innovation, just some maintenance. How many developers do you think Telegram has?

[shpx]

WhatsApp is one of the buggiest UIs I use daily. Random things like images/messages stacking on top of each other, seeing the HD and low definition videos as two separate things in favorites, never being able to view the HD one, sometimes the messages never scrolling quite to the bottom, just amateur level stuff, I'm a bit impressed with how bad it is.

[Saline9515]

Whatsapp is 5 years late in terms of features if you compare it to Telegram. It is here simply because of platform economics, nothing else.

[XorNot]

Except those are both done.

WhatsApp could not change for the next 50 years, and it would continue doing that just fine.

[Macha]

Google and Microsoft have significantly more products. That's even just counting their consumer products, their cloud providers are a whole other kettle of fish.

[pbreit]

"half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft"

That sounds like 2-10x too many. Think about what Google, Apple & Microsoft do compared to Meta.

[seattle_spring]

Heck, I could build Facebook in a weekend!

[pizlonator]

I would expect a company that makes some web pages to have less than half the people than:

- a company that makes the leading search engine, the leading browser, one of the two major mobile OSes, one of the major desktop OSes, some of the best ai hardware, and is in the running to win the ai race

- a company that makes the leading mobile and desktop OSes and the leading desktop and os hardware, one of the top consumer cloud offerings, a major online media store, and a popular consumer electronics retail store

[pembrook]

Think about the scope of Apple's business (Hardware, Processors, Operating Systems, Software competitors for every app category, Physical Retail, Global Ecommerce, Global distribution networks, App stores, Payments, Credit cards, Banking, Music streaming, Film/TV studio, etc).

Now compare it to Meta, a company where the vast majority of revenue is essentially a few mobile apps with an advertising network. No operating systems, no processor design, and a few hardware boondoggles only 1/10000th the scale of Apple's, etc.

Now realize that, if you subtract out Apple's retail employees, they have roughly similar headcount to Meta.

Now tell me again that Apple is in a "worse" position than Meta on efficiency.

[kaladin-jasnah]

> No operating systems, no processor design,

Meta bought Rivos, and as far as I can see do a ton of work related to Linux kernel stuff (I heard about this in the context of eBPF). But datacenter side, not consumer.

[philjohn]

You're comparing Apples to Oranges (with Apple).

about half (80k) of the equivalent fulltime employees at Apple are involved in the store footprint, so they're retail staff in one of their main sales channels.

And as other's have pointed out, Apple has a far wider range of products and services than Meta, and produce far more hardware products, including their own cutting-edge SOC's. Meta, meanwhile, get Broadcom to largely produce their "custom ASIC's", not just fab, but deeply involved in design, tape out, and validation.

[Aurornis]

> They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.

Meta is the youngest company of that group. Apple and Microsoft have been around for over twice as long.

Meta also has the narrowest scope of those companies.

Really it's kind of amazing that Meta has so many employees relative to those other companies given how much narrower their business is. Puts the overhiring into perspective.

[Lammy]

> If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.

Part of “Big Tech” hiring isn't just to have an important thing for everyone to do but also to keep competitors from having access to those people.

[akdev1l]

It was. Not anymore. See: layoffs.

[jiggawatts]

Microsoft and Google have a vastly broader array of products and systems compared to Meta.

[tootie]

Meta has substantially less revenue and less diversification than Apple or Google.

[strongpigeon]

Meta is going to surpass Google this year in revenue. I agree on the diversification front though

[gundmc]

> Meta is going to surpass Google this year in revenue. I agree on the diversification front though

Meta might surpass Google on _digital advertising revenue_.

Google's overall revenue is still ~2x Meta's

[hintymad]

Not familiar with Microsoft. But it's definitely amazing that Google managed to grow itself to one of the most bureaucratic companies in the past 15 years. And yeah, it's bloated as hell.

[Barrin92]

choosing 2021 is itself a really odd cutoff date to choose. The really bizarre hiring happened between 2016 and 2021 https://i.redd.it/c94hnp9kvzy91.png

They had 17k employees in 2016 and 80k in 2022. And given that a lot of the big tech companies looked like this albeit not quite so extreme I think it's right to say they might all have a glut of employees.

[wrigby]

I would argue that Meta had already overhired by the beginning of 2021, and the hiring spree was continuing.

[disgruntledphd2]

Meta was over hiring engineers from about 2015, if we're being honest.

[wrigby]

This is true, I just didn't want to admit it as someone who joined after 2015 but before 2021...

[disgruntledphd2]

Honestly, every one after about 2014 was too many (I joined in 2013).

There was an old all hands I watched in 2014 where Sheryl talked about how around 8k was the largest they should ever get.

More generally I think that while sales scales linearly, engineering and product should probably be sub linear.

[__turbobrew__]

Microsoft expects less from their engineers, and it shows in the large pay differential from Meta.

[compiler-guy]

Both Google and Microsoft are bigger, and with more products than Meta.

But both Google and Microsoft also massively overhired around the same timeframe as Meta, and are still digging themselves out of the mess of their own making. And making their teams pay for such stupidity.

[PaulHoule]

The usual story is that revenue/employee at Facebook is crazy high.

[Danox]

Not Apple, but if you see Apple join the layoff party, then you know things are really bad, however Google and Microsoft like Meta seem to go through this every five or six years.

[postexitus]

Microsoft, Apple and Google have much more diverse revenue streams. Meta only makes money from Ads. Only. It's crazy.

[coldtea]

>Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021.

So? They likely already had too many in 2021.

>They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.

Technology (hw/sw) wise, they also have 1/10 the internal tech and public product breadth and scope of Google or Apple and Microsoft. Maybe 1/50 even. They do like 4-5 social media and chat apps (that they hardly ever update anymore), and some crappy VR stuff nobody cares for.

[pclmulqdq]

Most of these companies kicked off the over-hiring in 2020 during the COVID boom they experienced. It was done by end of 2021.

[rokob]

This is actually a false premise pushed later to justify layoffs. They started overhiring in 2018-2019. They just continued a preexisting trend through 2021.