Tech companies are valued by how they dominate particular sectors/niches and the potential growth of that sector/niche.

Facebook doesn't dominate social any more like it once did. It did so with Facebook itself then with instagram but TikTok is grabbing the current generation of new users.

It can't grow like it once did and usage of its existing services will gradually decline.

It's betting that the metaverse is the next social medium after TikTok's short form video. Personally I doubt that but that's the bet they're making.

IMHO these hirings and firings are not about the present but about the future. Sure, Meta did great but Nokia also did great for a while after iPhone was introduced.

What is the latest cool Meta product which promises a bright future for the company? Well, llama is cool but it's not product and today's greatest social media sensation is TikTok.

I'm sure meta does have some great tech, in fact some of the work they did on VR with all these tens of billions of dollars is groundbreaking but that also failed as a product.

Why would they keep the workforce configuration the same if their current state is probably not what they want to be tomorrow?

Facebook’s ads business has been destroyed by Apple with the introduction of ATT. It’s pretty clear this is a permanent shift downward in revenue for them, unless advertisers like them are able to improve ads attribution.

It probably doesn't bode well that Cramer says Meta is ‘rapidly becoming my favorite stock’ :

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/14/club-meeting-recap-cramer-sa...

And from what I remember, many of the retention models also got screwed up (people weren’t quitting as often as before).

> Meta is doing great and just had one year of not insane growth.

This completely overlooks the changes that happened in that one year of not insane growth.

Apple cut Meta's legs off and Meta has no indication on how they're going to regrow them. The Metaverse is flopping, FB is seen as a place for hate, youths don't have accounts, etc, etc, etc.

Facebook is not the future of social media and Meta has not come up with a viable alternative.

Poor performance is relative to what their peers (Alphabet/Apple/Amazon/Microsoft) were accomplishing for many years in the 2010s.

The market has separated these 5 pretty clearly now, with Meta trailing by quite a bit, Alphabet and Amazon in the middle, and Microsoft and Apple with a decent lead.

The metric you choose matters. If you would have chosen EPS it tells a very different story, especially for investors.

Investors will tend to tolerate other faltering metrics for high revenue growth in startups, but that’s not Meta.

>Poor performance? Meta is doing great and just had one year of not insane growth.

Public sentiment is terrible and if that's a reliable leading indicator, the company will be in trouble if it doesnt continually diversify into products that distance themselves from the core brand.