Investor calls on Meta to slash headcount, slow metaverse spending - CNBC

Altimeter Capital Chair and CEO Brad Gerstner said successful an unfastened missive to the company and CEO Mark Zuckerberg connected Monday that Meta has excessively galore employees and is moving excessively dilatory to clasp the assurance of investors.

The Meta capitalist recommends a program to get the company's "mojo back" including reducing headcount expenses by 20% and limiting the company's pricey investments successful "metaverse" exertion — VR bundle and hardware — to nary much than $5 cardinal per year.

"Meta needs to re-build assurance with investors, employees and the tech assemblage successful bid to attract, inspire, and clasp the champion radical successful the world," Gerstner wrote successful the letter. "In short, Meta needs to get acceptable and focused."

The missive is the latest motion that Meta investors are starting to explicit reservations astir the company's caller performance. Meta banal is down implicit 61% successful 2022 truthful far.

At the extremity of the 2nd 4th this year, Altimeter Capital held implicit 245 cardinal shares of Meta.

It's besides a ballot of little assurance astir the company's ambitions successful the satellite of virtual and augmented reality. Meta changed its institution sanction from Facebook to amended absorption connected its VR hardware and software, and is spending $10 cardinal per twelvemonth connected the technology.

On Oct. 11, Meta announced a caller high-end VR headset, the Quest Pro. However, determination are fewer signs that VR oregon immoderate of Meta's metaverse apps, similar Horizon Worlds, are catching connected with the nationalist beyond aboriginal adopters.

"In addition, radical are confused by what the metaverse adjacent means," Gerstner wrote. "If the institution were investing $1–2B per twelvemonth into this project, past that disorder mightiness not adjacent beryllium a problem."

He says that the estimated luck that the institution is presently spending to make VR could instrumentality a decennary to travel to fruition.

"An estimated $100B+ concern successful an chartless aboriginal is super-sized and terrifying, adjacent by Silicon Valley standards," Gerstner wrote.

Ultimately, Gerstner believes that Meta has excessively galore radical and is spending excessively overmuch connected superior expenditures. If Meta was capable to power those costs, the capitalist says, past it could treble its escaped currency flow, and amended its stock price.

He argues that a 20% chopped successful worker spending would instrumentality Meta backmost to the levels of staffing it had past year, and that the institution can't walk arsenic it utilized to since the outgo of superior and involvement rates person risen recently.

In the letter, Gerstner says that Altimeter Capital doesn't person demands and simply wants to prosecute with Meta management. Meta didn't instantly instrumentality a petition for comment.

"But acold from being a atrocious decision, we deliberation the recommendations outlined supra volition pb to a leaner, much productive, and much focused institution — a institution that regains its assurance and momentum," Gerstner wrote.