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Meta 63,000 vs X 1,500 What it would take to run Meta if Elon Musk was in charge: Instagram - similar product to X: 1,500 Threads - built on Instagram backend: 300 Facebook - twice the complexity of Instagram: 3,000 Messenger, WhatsApp - Telegram is run by 30 people, but let's be generous: 200 Total: 5000 What are you all guys doing? Are the remaining 57,000 people all working on VR/AR and AI? Or are you all chilling and posts about high performance bar are all false?
You should also include biz orgs - sales, account managers. Internal support teams. Engineering teams would stop introducing new features if they just have enough time to fix bugs. And to introduce new features you need swe, product analysts, product managers, qa teams
63,000 is too much 1,500 is too less Around 30,000 is the sweet spot. Meta has lots of business, sales and support teams. The biggest would be roles like TPMs and middles managers. Especially in company like Meta with bottom up culture, these roles are really not needed.
AWS has only 120,000 people, despite a gazillion of diverse complex services and a massive sales headcount required for enterprise sales.
We have too many people in RL and monetization
we have at least one twitter's worth of people working on ads models alone.
The vast majority of them are sales or customer support, content moderation, etc. You need a lot of those things when your business is ads and you run a social network. X revenue is projected at 2.5 to 3 billion. Meta revenue last year was 135 billion, 45x as much. And in terms of profits it’s undefined since X loses money. Another example of this is asking why Amazon has 1.5 million employees. They do because the nature of their business requires it. It’s not all engineering.
Good point, sales, customer support, and content moderation grow with revenue, independently of product complexity. But even if 50% of employees are supporting operations, the difference in engineering headcount is still 21x.
OP, the answer lies in the reality that tech can be easily displaced and has literally near zero costs relative to real companies that need to spend money to build a product the consumer physically buys. It's the nature of the industry; the incremental $ spend of investment is much more variable than typical industries due to the easily displaced nature of tech. So you can either skimp on costs in the short term to boost your margins (short term view that Elon adopted as he felt he overpaid for twitter), or you can take a lower profit margin and have the money to be able to innovate and change the product Look at my company, Yahoo, for example. They were the kings of the internet (mail, search, news) and are now literally irrelevant. They treated the company like a cash cow, didn't innovate, and in a remarkably short amount of time got owned by those who did.
Why? Because we can! Meta could run the company with 10k people, not introduce much new stuff, make a ton of profit for a few years, and increase the risk of becoming irrelevant over time. Alternatively, we have the money to invest in a lot of new features, each requesting a lot of work because of the huge size of the existing system, and the crazy alignment cost (even worse in a company with a rather bottom up culture). And we'll see what sticks. Is it profit efficient today? No. Does it suppress completely the risk to slide to irrelevance over time? Absolutely not. Does it reduce this risk? Yes.
Thanks for a thoughtful comment
Saying instagram and X are the same is wild. Anyways, most are sales and marketing. Gotta sell ads and keep brands happy. They’re not all engineers - maybe 1/4, 1/3 at most. They have ads offices kinda all over where they have no engineering teams - like south america, most of europe. Also - teams working on web, mobile, browser, hardware, content moderation,
"Saying instagram and threads are the same is wild." This is not what I said. Threads leverage Instagram software stack and infra: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/building-metas-threads-app
"teams working on web, mobile, browser, hardware, content moderation," X has all of these too
Better way to compare will be revenue and profit per employee. May be check 10 years history and you may find out which approach works and which did not.
Revenue or profit per employee is what allows Meta to employ so many. It doesn't explain what they do.
Throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks, aka innovation.
Meta is competing to be the world's most valuable. X is going for bankruptcy.
And?
You need fewer employees if your goal is going bankrupt.