Meta is no longer trying to edge its way into the next tech cycle. In 2025, the company has chosen force, force of capital, force of culture, and force of leadership will, as its strategy to remain relevant in an AI-dominated future.
When CEO Mark Zuckerberg warned employees to “buckle up” for an “intense” year, it marked a deliberate corporate hard turn, fewer safety nets, higher pressure, and an all-in belief that speed and aggression will decide the AI race.
As reported by Business Insider, what followed was not merely a shift in technology priorities but an internal reckoning. As Meta pours billions into artificial intelligence, scales back its metaverse ambitions, and rewires how performance and loyalty are measured, the company has increasingly become defined by culture wars, talent rifts, and growing unease inside its workforce.
Determined to dominate the next era of AI, Meta has spent the past year in blitz mode. Zuckerberg overhauled divisions, reallocated resources to new products, and escalated spending in the AI arms race with OpenAI, Google, and others.
That push came with a noticeable shift in leadership tone, including his public celebration of what he described as more “masculine energy.”
Along the way, Meta raised performance expectations, cut thousands of jobs, and narrowed its focus all in pursuit of Zuckerberg’s sweeping vision of “personal superintelligence.”
While some of these moves improved efficiency and accelerated innovation, others destabilised teams. Current and former employees told Business Insider that repeated AI reorganisations and the intensifying talent wars triggered internal clashes.
Some also said layoffs earlier this year were unnecessarily demoralising after Zuckerberg publicly labelled those affected as “low performers.”
Big Tech’s harder edge
Meta’s transformation mirrors a shift across Big Tech. Companies are rewriting their playbooks, cutting costs, toughening their tone with employees, and making massive bets that artificial intelligence will decide who leads over the next decade.
Meta is wagering that moving faster and harder will give it an edge. After months of cultural reset early in 2025, employee sentiment improved in recent months, a Meta spokesperson said, citing an internal employee sentiment questionnaire.
Investors, however, remain cautious. Concerns centre on Meta’s plan to sink tens of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure and talent, raising questions about whether the company is overextending itself.
Shares are up 7.5% this year, less than half the S&P 500’s gains and behind most of the so-called Magnificent 7.
“The company must articulate its vision, show how its pieces fit together, and, most importantly, demonstrate steady growth,” said Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester to Business Insider.
This portrait of Meta’s “year of intensity” is based on interviews conducted by Business Insider with more than a dozen current and former employees, analysts, and academic researchers.
Rewriting the AI narrative
Over the summer, Zuckerberg moved to counter the perception that Meta was trailing its AI rivals. In June, the company made a $14 billion investment in AI training firm Scale AI and hired its 28-year-old founder, Alexandr Wang, as chief AI officer.
Two months later, Meta rebranded its AI organisation as Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL).
Even as leadership pushed to recruit top talent and reorganise teams, some former employees publicly questioned whether Meta had a coherent AI strategy.
According to Business Insider, Joena Zhang, a former MSL employee, wrote in a November LinkedIn post that “nobody really knew what anyone was doing” during the first half of the year, when the unit was still called GenAI. She described “endless” meetings that failed to produce “actual decisions.” In a July Substack post, former Meta researcher Tijmen Blankevoort echoed that sentiment, writing that Meta had “a wavering vision that was tough for team members to enthusiastically rally behind.”
The cost of competing for AI talent
To close the perceived gap with rivals, Meta began offering massive compensation packages to attract AI talent from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and other leading labs.
Internally, this created sharp rifts. Longtime employees bristled as new hires received significantly higher pay, increasing quiet competitions over whose ideas mattered more, according to two MSL employees. Tensions also emerged around access to computing resources and the prestige of being tied to the most elite teams at the centre of MSL, one researcher previously told Business Insider.
In August, Meta launched its fourth major AI reorganisation in six months. MSL was divided into four groups: a newly formed TBD Lab, a product team overseeing the Meta AI assistant, an infrastructure team, and the long-standing Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab.
After the reshuffle, project ownership became murky and employees were reassigned between teams, two MSL staffers said. One added that information flow between TBD and the rest of MSL was inconsistent.
Asked about the shake-up, a Meta spokesperson pointed to an X post from communications executive Andy Stone, who described earlier reporting on the restructuring as “navelgazing.”
Within two months of MSL’s formation, at least eight AI staffers, including researchers, engineers, and a senior product leader, left the company. Meta said most had been with the firm for years and that some attrition is normal at its scale.
Two months after the August changes, Meta cut roughly 600 jobs as part of a broader MSL reorganisation. Wang told employees the layoffs were intended to speed up decision-making.
Faster execution, deeper fractures
Some analysts argue the strategy is paying off. Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at Futurum Equities, said to Business Insider that the changes helped Meta accelerate model releases and integrate AI more deeply across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
“Meta is now one of the only companies training frontier-class models and deploying them to billions of users, which is exactly where I want it to be,” he said to Business Insider.
Beyond AI, Meta also reshuffled leadership within Reality Labs, the unit responsible for virtual and mixed-reality products. The company is considering budget cuts for the metaverse division, which could lead to job losses, a person familiar with the matter previously told Business Insider.
A Meta spokesperson said the company is reallocating investment to Business Insider “from Metaverse toward AI glasses and wearables” to align with momentum, adding it “wasn’t planning any broader changes than that.”
Performance management turns unforgiving
The MSL layoffs were part of a wider push to tighten operational efficiency. Meta reduced management layers and introduced a stricter performance review system than in previous years.
Zuckerberg told employees in January that he had “decided to raise the bar on performance management” and would move quickly to cut about 5% of “low performers.” In February, Meta laid off roughly 3,600 employees from a workforce of about 78,450.
By May, managers were instructed to place more employees in the bottom tier of performance rankings. For teams of 150 or more, 15% to 20% of staff were to be rated “below expectations,” up from 12% to 15% the year before.
Employees described the revised system as a pressure cooker that encouraged short-term thinking and cutthroat competition. Managers and staff said teams gravitated toward safer projects to avoid falling into lower rankings.
Two managers said the requirement to fill lower tiers led some leaders to leave roles vacant or hire employees solely to place them at the bottom.
Meta said employee sentiment improved later in the year. Its internal survey from October 20 to November 3 showed “optimism” rose to 80%, “pride” to 71%, and “confidence in leadership” to 68%. Each metric rose by 10 to 12 percentage points from the prior survey, and participation reached 91%, the company said to Business Insider.
Departures driven by values, not just pressure
Still, the combination of reorganisations, layoffs, and stricter expectations triggered a wave of exits in 2025, according to internal farewell posts reviewed by Business Insider. Some employees said Meta’s shifting political posture and governance changes no longer aligned with their values.
As reported by Business Insider, “Meta in 2025 is a very different company from what Oculus & Facebook were in 2017,” one engineer wrote in an internal farewell post after nearly eight years at the company. He cited “a matter of principles” and said the “sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit alignment with the new US government” conflicted with his personal beliefs.
Another former employee wrote of “the unnecessary pressure, lack of empathy, and occasional lack of fairness.” “Fighting for scope. Narratives. Oh, the narratives, I’m so looking forward to not hearing that word for a while,” the post said. “Smart and kind people bending their values to survive because they’ve been on the edge of their seats for too long.”
Some departing employees said they no longer felt they had meaningful ways to share feedback with leadership, particularly on topics like DEI and the embrace of “masculine energy.” They said Q&A questions were preselected and posts critical of leadership were sometimes removed.
“We will skip questions that we expect might be unproductive if they leak or things like people-related questions that have already been answered,” Meta’s VP of internal communications, Jonny Oser, told employees in an internal post.
In a January anonymous poll titled “Measuring workplace fear,” employees voted on how afraid they were that speaking openly about working conditions could lead to disciplinary action. The most common responses were “extremely afraid” and “very afraid,” according to a screenshot reviewed by Business Insider.
Even amid departures, others say Meta remains a compelling place to work, particularly for those comfortable in high-pressure environments.
“I would say that people who are confident in their skills and are high performers generally thrive,” one senior engineer told Business Insider. Another longtime employee said Meta once “coddled its staff,” but “that’s changing.”
For some, the draw remains obvious. “The positives are that we are still on the frontier in R&D,” one engineer explained to Business Insider. He further added, “There are a lot of cool AI, wearables, and robotics things going on,” offering high performers the chance to build valuable skills. “Also, we get paid a lot, still, and get free food and snacks,” the engineer added to Business Insider. “That helps.”
