Employees at Meta have begun noticing subtle signs that a new era was dawning. Around the time Mark Zuckerberg launched his first cost-cutting measures in late 2022, rumors spread that clocks disappeared from meeting rooms across the company’s offices, allegedly to save money on AA batteries. While the story may sound absurd, it reflected a broader shift: after two rounds of layoffs that cut 22,000 jobs, the culture at the Facebook-owner had changed. Gone were viral TikTok videos of rooftop yoga sessions and kombucha breaks, replaced by a cutthroat focus on a single mission — building artificial super-intelligence, a technology designed to act as friend, assistant, and even therapist.
Now, according to Times UK, the world’s fifth-richest man, with a net worth of $213 billion (£159 billion), is reportedly weighing a further workforce reduction of up to 20 per cent. That could mean another 15,000 employees lost, the largest culling in Meta’s history since Zuckerberg founded the company in 2004. While the company has described reports of such cuts as speculative, the potential scale has sent ripples of unease throughout Silicon Valley. AI systems capable of writing code, managing projects, and even performing creative work are reshaping the industry, leaving engineers and executives alike questioning their relevance.
“The job apocalypse is already here,” said Chris Larsen, founder of the San Francisco crypto company Ripple. He argued that Silicon Valley’s elite are misdirecting the public about AI, claiming it will augment humans while quietly preparing to centralize wealth and control. “There is a group of Silicon Valley leaders who stand to become trillionaires, and they are lying to us,” he told Times UK. “A huge part of labor stands to be destroyed, and a huge part of business too.”
Meta’s logic, from an internal perspective, is clear. The company plans to spend up to $135 billion in 2026 on data centers and AI systems, nearly double its 2025 outlay. Its long-term debt has more than tripled to $60 billion, and despite posting $62 billion in net income last year, the company is investing heavily in a future where machines, not humans, drive productivity. This transformation mirrors broader trends across the tech sector: coding agents from Anthropic and OpenAI now outperform human engineers, while free agents like Peter Steinberger’s OpenClaw can hire workers, manage inboxes, and make reservations without human input.
The psychological impact on the workforce has been profound. Former Dropbox chief technology officer Aditya Agarwal described his disorientation as AI tools began outperforming him: “There’s something deeply disorienting about watching the pillars of your professional identity get reproduced in a weekend by a tool that doesn’t need to eat or sleep.” At Anthropic, a safety researcher recently resigned, citing a sense of peril over AI’s rapid capabilities, before announcing plans to write poetry.
Meta is far from alone. Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, cut 40 per cent of staff at his payments company Block last month, reducing the workforce from 10,000 to 6,000. HSBC has reportedly considered cutting up to 20,000 roles over the next few years to adapt to AI integration. These moves indicate a broader reckoning: as AI agents become more capable, the very definition of work in Silicon Valley is under scrutiny.
The shift is not just about cost-cutting. Experts, including Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, see this as a transformation of the internet itself. Levie told The Sunday Times that 2026 could be the year AI agents outnumber human users online, forcing a redesign of software and online ecosystems to accommodate a digital workforce. Data centers, once anonymous storage sheds, are now the new factory floors, housing swarms of agents performing tasks previously done by humans.
This dynamic feeds existential angst across the tech sector. Economically, it coincides with warnings from Jerome Powell, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, that the American economy is producing zero net new jobs, a historic stagnation that AI skeptics link to automation and workforce displacement. Meanwhile, Meta continues to navigate its own challenges, having spent more than $95 billion on the Metaverse, its ambitious virtual reality platform, only to scale back development and close certain Horizon Worlds apps.
For now, the industry is in flux. Zuckerberg’s gamble on AI represents both a technological bet and a social experiment, potentially rewriting the rules of work, labor value, and economic hierarchy. Whether it will produce unprecedented efficiency or widespread disruption remains uncertain, but the message is clear: Silicon Valley is entering an era where humans may no longer be the most productive workforce in the room. As Times UK has observed, the floodgates of change have opened, and the tech world may never look the same again.
