During an earnings call with investors on October 26, Zuckerberg said the company would “focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas,” and that means “most of our teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year.” Zuckerberg said Meta would end 2023 “either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization.”In mid-September, the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta had begun “quietly nudging out a significant number of staffers” in a drive to cut costs by 10 percent.As far back as July, Zuckerberg told employees during a call that the company was facing one of the “worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history” and that workers should prepare to do more work with fewer resources.Zuckerberg and the leadership of Meta are following a script laid out by investor and Altimeter Capital Chief Executive Brad Gerstner.Gerstner, whose firm has $18 billion under management including 2.5 million Meta shares, issued an open letter to Zuckerberg on October 24 in which he said the company should slash its staff and cut back on its technology development plans such as the much-touted metaverse project.Referring to the change in the borrowing environment, Gerstner wrote, “Like many other companies in a zero-rate world—Meta has drifted into the land of excess—too many people, too many ideas, too little urgency.”He continued, “It is a poorly kept secret in Silicon Valley that companies ranging from Google to Meta to Twitter to Uber could achieve similar levels of revenue with far fewer people.”A measure of the ruthlessness of the billionaire elite in demanding the destruction of jobs in tech industries was the fact that the value of Meta stock rose by 3 percent on Monday following the Wall Street Journal report."