Walls close in on Zuckerberg as executives desert Meta

Among the most prominent global tech companies, Meta has been one of the few to fully embrace remote working. Its top executives have been encouraged to base themselves wherever in the world they please – prompting three of its senior managers to up sticks to London.

Sir Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister turned president of global affairs at Facebook’s parent company, is making a partial return to Britain as he splits his time between King’s Cross and Silicon Valley.

It comes despite the Liberal Democrat having lambasted the country’s “un-British” decision to leave the European Union, predicting a post-Brexit UK would be “economically insecure”.

Sir Nick joins executives including Adam Mosseri, the globetrotting head of Instagram whose previous remote office locations include Hawaii and Cape Cod, as well as Alex Schulz, Meta’s chief of marketing.

While on the surface it may seem the lure of London – and Meta’s state-of-the-art offices – is stronger than Californian sunshine, recent retreats point to deeper turmoil inside Meta. Some suggest it lies in the current visions of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and his increasing unwillingness to be challenged.

On a staff call in June the chief executive reacted sharply when an employee asked if Meta Days, extra holidays introduced during the pandemic, would continue.

“Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” retorted the 38-year-old.

Reaction was mixed: a post on Workplace, the company’s internal noticeboard, reportedly quipped: “Who hired them?”

Meta is at pains to say its itinerant executives are merely visiting other countries, inferring their hearts and minds remain firmly rooted at its Menlo Park headquarters in California. While that may be true for some of the current crop, a slew of departures over the last couple of years raises the question of whether Zuckerberg is becoming increasingly isolated.

Earlier this year, Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s long-term chief technical officer, was superseded by Andrew “Boz” Bosworth as Meta’s chief technology officer. Bosworth’s latest public pronouncement was to declare that he was taking a month off work: “I tell my team often to take the time they need, as I think that has been a major key to my longevity in this industry.”

Meanwhile, Antonio Lucio, Schulz’s predecessor as marketing chief and a veteran of Hewlett Packard, walked out of Facebook to become a diversity consultant in mid-2020, saying the move would mark the “twilight” of his career.

And Fidji Simo, a 36-year-old female executive heading up the core Facebook app, left last year to run grocery delivery app Instacart. She told CNBC at the time that Zuckerberg had been “incredibly supportive” of her departure, adding: “Obviously sad that we couldn’t find something that aligned at Facebook, but also incredibly supportive of me taking on this role.”

Her departure sent ripples through the world of Big Tech, not least because of an anecdote doing the rounds about the background to her decision. The leadership of Instagram was said to be up for grabs, and Simo was summoned to Zuckerberg to describe her vision for growing the product. She didn’t get the job.

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Adam Mosseri, chief of Instagram - Heathcliff O'Malley

Deprived of the natural next career step, Simo began looking outside Facebook; a board seat at Instacart followed by the offer of the chief executive’s chair won.

This increasing disconnect at Meta’s highest level comes as Zuckerberg’s ideas to keep his company at the top of the social media pile begin to look increasingly unsteady.

Facebook insiders hold mixed views on the executive flight, both through the medium of pink slips and through self-directed corporate postings to far flung locations.

According to one source, Sir Nick’s promotion in February to president of global affairs displayed that Zuckerberg’s trust in him had reached an all-time high: “it's pretty important that a figure like him has good connections in Europe.”

Good as those connections may be, what Meta needs is good ideas and they are in visibly short supply.

The metaverse – Facebook’s idea that the future of human interaction involves attending work meetings from your kitchen table while wearing a virtual reality headset – may have seemed like a natural extension of pandemic-driven remote working policies in 2021 when first announced. Current corporate interest in the metaverse concept is already waning, however, and the product is yet to launch.

Zuckerberg’s company is sensitive to comparisons between the metaverse concept and Second Life, a mid-2000s internet-based multiplayer game memorably dubbed “Sadville” by technology website The Register. Sadville was the metaverse of its day: corporations such as Coca-Cola and IBM set up virtual offices within the game, convinced they had found the future of commerce. Fifteen years later, few remember Sadville.

Meta’s latest financial results, meanwhile, indicate a brain drain at the top is beginning to make the company wobble: it posted its first ever revenue decline in July’s quarterly results. That slowing growth prompted Zuckerberg to start mulling Facebook’s first ever bond sale of up to $10bn (£8.2bn), reported Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, rivals are snapping at Meta’s heels as its chief ponders a future of virtual avatars. Chinese-owned TikTok’s rate of growth – fuelled by an exodus of users from Instagram – is the cited reason behind Mosseri relocating to London. An exodus of Instagram users to TikTok alarmed management at the photo sharing app to the point of attempting to switch tact to focus on video.

Yet Instagram boss Mosseri was forced into a partial retreat after earning the wrath of the Kardashians and influencer royalty, who complained it was becoming too video-centric.

However, the bigger question is why the changes were made at all. The media and ad industries still have raw memories of Facebook’s illusory “pivot to video” in the late 2010s, a pivot that turned out to be built on fake statistics from the site about the market impact of video advertising on its website.

Zuckerberg himself has become increasingly reliant on Sir Nick. But the question remains over whether he can live up to the task of keeping Meta in the black – and the walls from closing in on Zuckerberg.

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