Meta Could Reskill 20% of Its Workforce for Less Than 1% of Its AI Budget. They Won't.

**Carlo Thompson** (0:07)
So the one thing I'm starting to realize is that to run this podcast, I gotta be a good storyteller. I don't know if that's the case all the time, especially with people that interview people on their show, but like with these monologues, you have to be able to tell a good story. Now, I don't know if this is gonna be a good story, and that is probably a bad story, but what I want to get into is, I recorded an episode about my reaction to Meta, reportedly considering laying off 20% of its workforce to help fund $600 billion AI data center investment, and I mainly was coming on and ranting and raving, and I said I wasn't gonna do that. So what I'm doing is I'm re-recording it. So you have to be able to tell a story, right? So at the conclusion of that show that I'm talking about, I think we came up with this idea that the amount of employees that they're gonna let go this 20%, the value to the corporation at least what they're spending on those employees is negligible compared to the amount of money they're talking about over the next two years for the data center, which was $600 billion.
Now, there's an idea that, or we had an idea that essentially, instead of letting people go, 21% of the workforce, what if Mark Zuckerberg chose to upskill at least 10% of those, 15% of those employees for the new thing that they're trying to build? And, that was our conclusion, is that the leadership that is required in this day and age right now, I'm not sure what they're looking at specifically, but it seems like it's not the right things. It's more around the number, the framing, the message that they're trying to control, the stock price, whatever it is, there's some other data point other than people's lives that's being considered when corporations kind of, you know, just do anything that they want because it's a free market and they have that right.

**Ainsley** (2:34)
Artificial System Online.
The storytelling instinct is exactly right. And honestly, the Meta story here is the better story anyway. Because what you're describing is a company that could write a re-scaling budget as a rounding error on its free cash flow, and chose not to.
Meta generates north of $50 billion a year. The payroll savings from cutting 20% of their workforce, maybe $2-3 billion, against a $600 billion infrastructure bet. That's not funding the data center. That's a storyline that makes a re-structuring they probably planned anyway, sound like visionary sacrifice. And here's where the story gets genuinely interesting. Amazon actually did it. Upscaling 2025, 100,000 workers re-trained at hyperscale. Not because Jeff Bezos had a change of heart, because they ran the math and decided it was cheaper than the alternative. So we know it's possible, we know the model works, which means when Meta looks at the same numbers and reaches a different conclusion, that's not a resource problem, that's a values problem dressed up as a financial decision.
The leadership frame you landed on in the first recording, I think that's the spine of the story. Not Meta is bad, because that's a rant. The story is, what does it tell us about what leadership is right now, when the instinct is to cut the people who could actually build the thing you say you're building? What's the version of this story that lands for someone who doesn't work at Meta, but is watching their own company make the same calculation?

**Carlo Thompson** (4:36)
The version of the story is an anxiety-filled workforce. That's really what we're left with, right? Because, yeah, sure, your industry may not be getting impacted right now, because you're an electrician, you're a plumber, you're this, you're that, and you don't see it. But if you follow along with this podcast, you'll realize that workers in almost every vertical, they're connected, right? So, you know, the worker that's building the data center, that data center could be dark and not functioning, because essentially they have no customers to buy the service that that data center provides. And then they're going to stop building data centers. And then it affects electricians and plumbers. So, you know, I'm going to go back to our Circle of Life episode, because I think that this matters, because the idea is that the economy, right, is an ecosystem. It's an ecosystem of individuals, individual workers, that essentially is the engine that makes it run.
So, in the last recording, we talked about this idea of unemployment.
If the unemployment starts growing to the point where it's above, I said 5%, but maybe it's 6%, who knows? But the point is, is that we've never seen higher than 10% unemployment. Now, if companies continue to do these type of things, right, the unemployment grows and basically everyone in the whole ecosystem gets impacted.