Meta's layoffs were expensive — it may have spent more than $88,000 per employee to cut 11,000 from the ranks

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Meta's layoffs were expensive — it may have spent more than $88,000 per employee to cut 11,000 from the ranks
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg cut 13% of the company's workforce in November.Facebook/Meta


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  • In November 2022, Meta laid off more than 11,000 employees, or 13% of its workforce.
  • The layoffs were the most significant job cuts in the company's history.

The numbers are in, and Meta's mass layoffs announced in November cost the company a pretty penny.

On Wednesday, Myles Udland— now the Head of News at Yahoo Finance and a former markets correspondent for Insider — laid out part of Meta's balance sheet in a tweet:

Udland estimated that Meta shelled out approximately $88,000 a person to cut more than 11,000 employees out of its workforce in November.

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The number comes from dividing the $975 million that the company paid in "Severance and Other Personnel" costs by 11,000, approximately the number of employees the company cut in November. The result comes out to around $88,636 a person, adding room for the "more than" 11,000.

The calculation was subsequently confirmed by Daniel Ives, managing director and senior equity analyst at investment firm Wedbush Securities.

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The cost of cutting those employees is particularly significant amid rising concerns that Meta is preparing for an additional round of layoffs this year.

In the company's fourth-quarter earnings release posted Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg warned that Meta's management theme for 2023 was 'Year of Efficiency.'

Meta did not immediately respond to Insider's request for a comment.

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