Sri Lankan-born Social Capital founder and CEO Chamath Palihapitiya, who was once an early member of then-Facebook’s senior executive team, contributed to the seemingly endless debate this week on the payoffs shouldered by modern technology companies. On Saturday night, he took to his official X profile to weigh in on a Meta engineer’s rant about the surging layoff wave and the supposed H-1B visa takeover of the American professional world that went viral on Blind, the anonymous forum and community for verified employees.
The South Asian-origin entrepreneur, who’s now included in US President Donald Trump’s tech-focused social circle, didn’t explicitly comment on the H-1B non-immigrant visa program this time. While the issue has often become a notable talking point on his podcast and X, Palihapitiya stuck to dissecting something that “increasingly” became an “issue for all of Tech” and not just the Mark Zuckerberg-led giant.
Chamath Palihapitiya reacts to ‘Meta engineer’s’ viral post
“This isn’t just a $META issue,” Chamath began on X. “It’s increasingly an issue for all of Tech. Because even within Tech, there is an emerging divide between AI-superpowered engineer/PM/sales folks and everyone else.”
His Saturday tweet was a response to a viral Blind post wherein a Meta engineer spoke out about how “bad things are right now.” The tech giant’s employee looked back to a time when people took pride in being recognised as a “Facebook engineer,” as it meant the person had “strong problem-solving skills, top-tier technical skills.” He then drew comparisons between when top graduates from Ivy League schools in the US were “getting lured by Facebook” and the current scenario where “desperate H-1Bs… with no life at this company” have crowded the hiring space.
Suggesting that being laid off in the current economy was barely a matter of “when” and not “if,” the Meta employee also complained about “atrocious rent prices” raining down on techies’ parade.
Former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya analyses the rising hate for ‘tech elites’
Having mentioned a divide was emerging “between AI-superpowered engineer/PM/sales folks and everyone else,” the former Facebook veteran said that the distasteful dynamic would inevitably result in a situation where even smaller organisations originally promising bigger payoffs would “rot” from both the outside and inside as riches would be “distributed ever fewer players.”
Sending out a message to his peers and “super entrepreneurs who are far more successful,” the Canadian-American venture capitalist explained, “This is why elites in tech that ‘have made it’ are increasingly the ones that EVERYONE hates.”
“We don’t act as stewards in the broadest sense of the term. We aren’t bringing society along like other generations of super successful business people have,” he continued. “We don’t pay it forward in any meaningful way – although we have clever ways to make it look like we do. Mostly, people see us hoarding all the gains.”
He then accused modern technology companies of creating a “new form of indentured servitude for the educated masses.” Questioning the troubling image, he asked, “What does it mean to make $500k/yr if you still leak 55% to taxes then your landlord takes the next 25% for rent.”
In such a situation, Palihapitiya argued that even if one’s salary is credited, buying a house in Silicon Valley is impossible. “These folks are on an eternal hamster wheel. It turns out it’s not much different than being in middle America making $55k,” he said.
Meta is a top H-1B sponsor
According to a Business Insider report, Meta paid extraordinary levels of base salaries to secure top engineering talent last year, rivalling Silicon Valley’s pay scales. H-1B visa data listed therein indicated that a software engineer earned $450,000 per year, while a product manager got $400,000. A research engineer, on the other hand, took home $400,000, and a product manager secured $380,000 before stock options, bonuses and other perks.
The data also demonstrated that half of Meta’s visa-holders hired in 2025 were software engineers. The company also happened to be one of the top tech firms dominating the H-1B visa list in 2025.
Meta had approved the second-highest number (1,555) of H-1B petitions for initial employment in FY 2025, according to a National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) analysis of USCIS data. As far as H-1B petitions for continuing employment go, Meta was at No. 4 with 4,863 approvals after Amazon, TCS and Microsoft. (Note: An H-1B visa holder may be approved several times for continuing employment in the same year if their location changes.)
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