Comment by decimalenough

9 hours ago

My gut feel was that you can't be right, but it looks like you are: cutting 8000 employees * $500k/year total cost to company (rough but useful ballpark figure) is "only" $4B.

Cross-checking against actual expenditure, Meta spent $118B total last year, with the second largest component of total spending being stock comp at $42B, of which vast slabs went to the top leadership that's presumably also not getting fired.

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decimalenough

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bandrami  8 hours ago

Though not all of that capex is cash; there's a whole phantom wampum AI economy where the big players are trading promissory notes for compute that doesn't exist yet (and may never exist) some time in the future and booking it as revenue.

  • loeg  8 hours ago

    Maybe you're thinking of AWS/Azure/Oracle? Meta isn't selling their compute.

    • bandrami  7 hours ago

      Meta plays that game too; they're on the hook to buy compute that CoreWeave has yet to build (and may never be able to build) which counts as "revenue" for CoreWeave and an "asset" for Meta even though no actual money or compute has changed hands.

    • gostsamo  7 hours ago

      Meta promised to buy dc capacity for ai workloads. If I remember it correctly, it created a common company with an investment fund as well that took on debt to build capacity.

      You calculate the cutoffs as savings for this years while imagining that the future payments are payments only for this year. At the same time the commitments are for 5-20 years ahead and the laid off people would be off the payroll for the same multiple years ahead.

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