• Why does Instagram want to show you stuff it thinks you'll like instead of letting you pick for yourself?
• And why is Instagram focused on getting people to share photos and videos privately?
• The two ideas are connected, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri explains: Normal people simply aren't sharing as much in public as they used to.

Adam Mosseri's official title is head of Instagram, Meta's massive photo and video app. He also runs Threads, the Twitter clone the company launched two years ago.

Unofficially, he's become one of Meta's chief explainers, frequently jumping on social media to defend and proselytize on behalf of his employer.

So when I got a chance to interview Mosseri, I had a long list of questions about… lots of things: I wanted to know how Mosseri felt about the company's recent pivot to Trump-friendly policies, and how he looked at TikTok, and a million other things. I didn't have enough time to get to everything, but I got to a lot of it, and you can hear our whole conversation on my Channels podcast.

In the edited excerpt below, Mosseri and I go over some big-picture stuff that tells you a lot about the current state of social media: Like why Instagram, Facebook and every other social media platform rely on algorithms to show you stuff they thinks you like, instead of relying on users to program their own experience. And why the company is gung-ho on getting users to privately send each other photos and videos, instead of its initial focus — getting them to post stuff on a public feed.

And I also wanted to know about the backstory behind Threads — the text-based social network it launched just as Elon Musk was taking over Twitter. Mosseri was happy to talk about all of it.

Peter Kafka: In the first few years of social media feeds, users would see a list of everything that everyone they were following had posted, in chronological order. Now, the standard at every app is a curated, algorithmic feed. Why does everyone who runs a social media product think that's better?

Adam Mosseri: It's because it's the only way to grow these experiences.

The amount of content people post publicly in feeds is going down across the entire industry, because people are moving more and more sharing to stories — which you could argue is a different kind of feed — but even more into messaging, group chats, one-on-one chats.

On Instagram, there are way more photos and videos shared into DMs than into stories, and way more photos and videos are shared into stories than into the feed. So if the amount of content you have to rank is decreasing — how engaging the feed is is also just decreasing. It's just getting worse.

We show recommendations because you might follow 200 accounts and one in 10 of them posted. So we've [only] got 20 things [to show you]. And we can reorder those 20 things 20 factorial ways, but that's only so much upside.

Whereas if we look at the billion things posted in a given day and we find something you're interested in, there's more upside.

Instagram has been encouraging messaging. It's something you've been talking about for a while. It's something users were doing on their own, and now you guys are responding to it?

Oh yeah. It's a paradigm shift.

The thing you hear is that people are going to chats because they feel like that's safer or they can have more candor. But are regular people literally thinking about how their posts are gonna be received? Is there some other reason people are sharing more privately versus publicly?

The foundational reason is that there are more things that you would feel comfortable saying to somebody one-on-one than things you would feel comfortable sharing publicly.

This is a weirdly sad example, but you could think of sharing in-feed as standing on top of your roof, yelling something at a hundred people, and hoping that 20 people hear it. There's some things I would do that for. But the average thing — the amount of things I would say to you on a phone call, my wife on a phone call, my best friend on a phone call — there's a lot more of those things. I think that's the most important reason.

How does that shift affect the business of Meta?

It moves more and more of that friend content into private experiences. And then the question is, can you either make those private sharing experiences symbiotic with the ones that we monetize — like feed and stories? Or can you monetize those experiences directly?

For Instagram, the thing that has been amazing is that we have leaned into video in a way that actually grows messaging. When I worked on the Facebook app, we leaned a lot into video in 2014, 15, 16. We were very focused on trying to catch up with YouTube, and growing video grew the amount of time spent in the Facebook app — but it decreased everything else. It decreased messages, comments, likes, and revenue — because there's less ads per minute.

[But] with Reels on Instagram, because they're short and because they're entertaining… I'll see a standup comic doing a bit that I love and I'll send it to my brother, because I know he's going to enjoy it.

Or I'll see a piece on politics and I'll send it to you. Because I think you might be interested in it. And then you and I talk, maybe you look at your feed, maybe you engage with something else. Maybe you send that to somebody else.

So there is a private messaging part of the experience, [but] we've managed to build it in a way that's very symbiotic with the public context — like feed and stories and reels, which we monetize directly with ads.

We're going to show you engaging stuff, you're going engage in it, and we'll be able to monetize your eyeballs like we always have — and then you'll share it with other people.

It's a positive feedback loop. And it's important particularly for Instagram because we are about connecting with your friends over creative things. I mean, for some people, we might be a pure entertainment-based or public content-based app. But we want friend content to continue to be a core part of the experience for most users.

And this allows Instagram to stay social, but still grow as a business.

I wanted to ask you about the Threads origin story. I didn't realize that it was originally supposed to be a feature within Instagram.

We were talking about different ways to compete more directly with Twitter…

Why? I know that back around 2010, the two services were fiercely competitive. And then basically that competition stopped, because you guys just lapped Twitter over and over and you won. There were many more people who wanted to engage in a Facebook and Instagram-like experience than they did on Twitter.

So why bother going back to Twitter?

I think Twitter's a great app in a lot of ways. I use Twitter a lot, still. I think it's better for public conversations.

Even though it's not the biggest app, there's a lot of cultural relevance. There's a lot of really vibrant, amazing communities there — NBA Twitter, black Twitter there. There's these insular networks like VC Twitter and crypto Twitter.

And part of what we care about at Instagram is being a place where creatives do their thing.

And the initial thought was to bolt it onto Instagram?

Around that time we really accelerated our work on broadcast channels on WhatsApp and on Instagram and on Messenger — which by the way, are a big deal in a lot of the rest of the world, particularly popularized by Telegram. We looked at and had a bunch of designs for building something like Threads as a tab into Instagram. And we did consider and ended up building a separate app, and there were a lot of contentious debates.

What did you want to do? Where did you want what's now called Threads to live?

I was excited about channels. But Mark [Zuckerberg] made the point — and I agreed with him — that channels are not going to be a place where you keep up with tons and tons of culturally relevant people. They're going to be a place where you subscribe to the five or 10 you care about most.

I was more bullish on building something within Instagram. Mark's point was that a separate app will be harder — but if it was successful, it would be a more valuable thing to create in the world.

A lot of what Mark does is anchor us really high. And no matter how strong a year we have, the question is always — how can we do better?

It was late. I was in Italy for my anniversary with my wife, and [Mark's] like, "Well, if you were gonna do something bigger, what would you do?"

So I was riffing and I kind of pitched a version of Threads: We'll lean on Instagram's strength with creators. We'll use Instagram identity. You can bootstrap it with [Instragram's social] graph, but we'll focus on basic replies and threads. I called it Textagram as a joke. Which unfortunately stuck as a name for months before I managed to kill it.

And Mark's like, "Yeah, that's a good idea. We should do that." And I was like, "I don't think we should do that." And in the classic Mark move, he said, "OK. But if you don't do it, I'll have somebody else do it, and it'll be built on Instagram."

And I said, "OK. Sounds like I'm signed up." So he gets the credit.

• Does Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have a bunker? Not if you ask him.
• He calls the 5,000-square-foot underground structure at his Kauai ranch "a little shelter."
• Here's what we know about Zuckerberg's plans for the bunker-not bunker.

Billionaires are no strangers to extensive real estate portfolios, and many of them are building their own Doomsday bunkers.

Shall we count Mark Zuckerberg among them? If you ask him, no.

The Meta CEO said on a recent episode of the podcast "This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von" that he does "have an underground tunnel" at his ranch on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, though he resisted characterizing it as a bunker.

"There's this whole meme about how people are saying I built this, like, bunker underground. It's like more of underground storage type of situation," Zuckerberg said. "It's sort of a tunnel that just goes to another building."

Zuckerberg's real estate portfolio includes expansive holdings in Hawaii. He began snapping up land there more than a decade ago. He reportedly paid $100 million for roughly 750 acres in 2014 and $53 million for another 600 acres on Kauai's North Shore in 2021.

In December 2023, Wired reported that Zuckerberg was building a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter, complete with its own supplies of energy and food, at his Ko'olau Ranch property. The final bill after tallying up building permits and land will be about $270 million, the magazine reported.

Wired reported the Kauai compound would feature two mansions linked by a tunnel that also connects to the shelter, which would have "living space, a mechanical room, and an escape hatch that can be accessed via a ladder," as well as a sturdy metal door filled with concrete.

Brandi Hoffine Barr, a spokesperson for Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, declined to comment to Wired at the time regarding the size or features of the underground structure.

Local news outlet Hawaii News Now reported in December that it had obtained county planning documents showing an underground "storm shelter" measuring nearly 4,500 square feet on his property, roughly the size of an NBA basketball court.

In a December Bloomberg interview, Zuckerberg equated the bunker to "a basement" or "a little shelter."

"There's just a bunch of storage space and like, I don't know, whatever you want to call it, a hurricane shelter or whatever," he said. "I think it got blown out of proportion as if the whole ranch was some kind of Doomsday bunker, which is just not true."

Zuckerberg posted a video on Instagram in January 2024 poking fun at the discourse surrounding his property, saying, "When your wife catches you in the 'bunker' playing video games." The clip shows Chan walking into a keypad-operated room resembling a home movie theater where Zuckerberg is seen gaming with friends on a massive screen.

Zuckerberg has also posted on Instagram about starting cattle ranching on the property.

"Started raising cattle at Ko'olau Ranch on Kauai, and my goal is to create some of the highest quality beef in the world," he wrote in January 2024. "The cattle are wagyu and angus, and they'll grow up eating macadamia meal and drinking beer that we grow and produce here on the ranch."

The following month, he said that he was "not trying to do this commercially" and was "just trying to create the highest-quality stuff we can." He also explained the reasoning behind the cows' diet of macadamia nuts and beer.

"As a human, what do you think is the thing that basically you just sit and eat a lot? It's like beer and nuts, basically. Nuts, super dense. Beer induces appetite, which I think people are familiar with."

He added that he wanted to feed the cows the "densest, most nutritious" food so they would gain weight and "be the most delicious cows."

In addition to cattle ranching, the land would include "organic ginger and turmeric farms, a nursery dedicated to native plant restoration, and partnering with Kauai's foremost wildlife conservation experts to protect native birds and other endangered or threatened wildlife populations," a spokesperson for Zuckerberg and Chan told Business Insider.

"Mark and Priscilla value the time their family spends at Ko'olau Ranch and in the local community and are committed to preserving the ranch's natural beauty," the spokesperson said. "When they acquired the property, they rescinded an existing agreement that would have allowed for portions of the property to be divided into 80 luxury homes. Under their care, less than 1% of the overall land is developed with the vast majority dedicated to farming, ranching, conservation, open spaces, and wildlife preservation."

Meta thinks there's no reason to carry on with its defense after the Federal Trade Commission closed its monopoly case, and the company has moved to end the trial early by claiming that the FTC utterly failed to prove its case.

"The FTC has no proof that Meta has monopoly power," Meta's motion for judgment filed Thursday said, "and therefore the court should rule in favor of Meta."

According to Meta, the FTC failed to show evidence that "the overall quality of Meta’s apps has declined" or that the company shows too many ads to users. Meta says that's "fatal" to the FTC's case that the company wielded monopoly power to pursue more ad revenue while degrading user experience over time (an Internet trend known as "enshittification"). And on top of allegedly showing no evidence of "ad load, privacy, integrity, and features" degradation on Meta apps, Meta argued there's no precedent for an antitrust claim rooted in this alleged harm.

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• Meta is recruiting people to record facial expressions and small talk to help build virtual avatars.
• It's for "Project Warhol," which is run by the data firm Appen, and pays $50 an hour.
• Meta's Reality Labs has lost $60 billion since 2020, and it sees 2025 as a make-or-break year.

What's in a smile? If you're training Meta's virtual reality avatars, it could be $50 an hour.

The tech giant is recruiting adults through the data-collection and -labeling company Appen to spend hours in front of cameras and sensors to help "enhance the virtual reality of the future."

Meta's avatars have come a long way since they were widely mocked on the internet nearly three years ago.

Now, with 2025 internally described as Meta's "most critical year" for its metaverse ambitions, the company is betting that hyperrealistic digital avatars can drive its next wave of virtual and augmented technologies, from Quest headsets to Ray-Ban smart glasses.

But to get there, Meta needs more data.

Inside Project Warhol

The company is paying freelancers to record their smiles, movements, and small talk as part of a data collection effort called "Project Warhol," run by Appen, which lists Meta as the client in its consent forms.

Meta confirmed to Business Insider that Project Warhol is part of its effort to train Codec Avatars — a research initiative announced publicly in 2019 that aims to build photorealistic, real-time digital replicas of people for use in virtual and augmented reality.

Codec Avatars are a key technology for Meta's vision of "metric telepresence," which the company says enables social presence that is "indistinguishable from reality" during virtual interactions.

A Meta spokesperson told BI the company has been running similar avatar data collection studies for several years. Project Warhol appears to be the latest round of that effort.

Recruitment materials invite anyone over 18 to take part in paid sessions to "assist in the bettering of avatars." The project is split into two studies — "Human Motion" and "Group Conversations" — both set to begin in September at Meta's Pittsburgh research facility.

In the Human Motion study, participants would be recorded "mimicking facial expressions, reading sentences, making hand gestures," while cameras, headsets, and sensors capture their movements from every angle.

The Group Conversations study would bring together two or three participants to "engage in conversations and light improv activities." Researchers are aiming to capture natural speech, gestures, and microexpressions to build avatars that are more "lifelike and immersive" in social settings.

A high-stakes year for Meta

The project comes in a crunch year for Meta Reality Labs, the division that oversees avatars, headsets, and smart glasses. It has accumulated more than $60 billion in losses since 2020, including a record $4.97 billion operating loss in the fourth quarter of 2024.

In an internal memo from November, first reported by BI, Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, said 2025 would be crucial for the metaverse's success or failure. He told staff that the company's ambitious metaverse bets could be remembered as a "legendary misadventure" if they failed.

In his memo, Bosworth stressed the need to boost sales and engagement, especially in mixed reality and "Horizon Worlds." He added that Reality Labs planned to launch half a dozen more AI-powered wearable devices, though he didn't give details.

In April, Meta laid off an undisclosed number of employees from Reality Labs, including teams working on VR gaming and the Supernatural fitness app. Dan Reed, the chief operating officer of Reality Labs, announced his departure weeks later after nearly 11 years with the company.

The Appen project's name appears to be a nod to Andy Warhol, the Pittsburgh-born artist who famously said everyone would have "15 minutes of fame."

Appen declined to comment on the project.

The humans behind the scenes

Project Warhol isn't the only example of Meta turning to human labor to train its technology.

BI previously reported that the company enlisted contractors through the data-labeling startup Scale AI to test how its chatbot responds to emotional tones, sensitive topics, and fictional personas.

And it's not just Meta. Last year, Tesla paid up to $48 an hour for "data collection operators" to wear motion-capture suits and VR headsets while performing repetitive physical tasks to help train its humanoid robot, Optimus.

• Meta has removed an unauthorized ad featuring Jamie Lee Curtis after she called out Mark Zuckerberg.
• She wrote an open letter to the Meta CEO on Instagram, calling the ad a "totally AI fake commercial."
• Meta simply said the ads were a violation and had been removed.

Meta has taken down a misleading ad featuring an image of Jamie Lee Curtis after the actor flagged it on Instagram.

The "Halloween" franchise actor wrote an open letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, posted in front of her more than 6 million Instagram followers, imploring his company to remove an unauthorized post using her likeness.

"It's come to this @zuck," Curtis wrote in an Instagram post on Monday, tagging Zuckerberg. "Hi. We have never met. My name is Jamie Lee Curtis and I have gone through every proper channel to ask you and your team to take down this totally AI fake commercial." She added that it was nonsense that she "didn't authorize, agree to, or endorse."

Curtis said she'd tried to DM Zuckerberg but wasn't able to do so since he didn't follow her, so her last resort was to "take to the public instaverse" to reach him.

Her post also showed the ad in question. It features a real photo of Curtis, taken from an interview she did with the MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle in January, but is overlaid with a fake caption implying Curtis said, "I'd want everyone suffering from."

"If I have a brand, besides being an actor and author and advocate, it is that I am known for telling the truth and saying it like it is and for having integrity," Curtis said in her post. "This (MIS)use of my images (taken from an interview I did with @stephruhle during the fires) with new, fake words put in my mouth, diminishes my opportunities to actually speak my truth."

A Meta spokesperson told Business Insider the ads were a violation and had been removed.

Curtis subsequently added a comment on her post that said: "IT WORKED! YAY INTERNET! SHAME HAS IT'S VALUE!
THANKS ALL WHO CHIMED IN AND HELPED RECTIFY!"

Meta announced last year that it had begun testing the use of facial recognition technology to detect these "celeb bait" ads, which use pictures of public figures to lure people to scam websites that prompt them to share personal information or send money. It's unclear what the ad featuring Curtis was promoting or whether it led users to a scam site.

Meta says the facial recognition technology compares faces in the ad with the celebrity's profile pictures on Facebook and Instagram, and if it's a match and the ad is found to be a scam, it'll be blocked. Facial data generated for the comparison is immediately deleted, whether it yielded a match or not, the company adds.

• Palmer Luckey said he joined an exclusive group chat after selling Oculus to Facebook in 2014.
• The "B Boys Club" includes entrepreneurs who sold companies for at least $1 billion, Luckey said in a recent podcast interview.
• Conversations in the chat include questions about each other's spending habits, he added.

Correction: May 13, 2025 — An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Luckey had said there weren't any female founders whose companies had been acquired for $1 billion or more. Luckey said that there weren't any female founders who had applied to the group chat.

It's a group chat with "the boys" — but you have to have sold a unicorn to get an invite.

Palmer Luckey says he scored an invite to an exclusive group chat after he sold his virtual-reality startup, Oculus, to Facebook in 2014.

The "B Boys Club" is a private message thread reserved for entrepreneurs who were able to pull off big business deals, Luckey said in a May 6 episode of Peter Diamandis' "Moonshots" podcast.

"It's all boys who have sold a company for at least $1 billion," said Luckey, who sold Oculus for $2 billion.

"That's the membership criteria, it doesn't exclude women, women would be allowed, it's just thus far only boys have applied," Luckey said.

Based on the criteria laid out by Luckey, there are some notable names in the tech and business world that would be eligible for a "B Boys Club" invitation.

Like Luckey, Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, as well as WhatsApp founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton, all sold their companies to Facebook, now Meta, for at least $1 billion. A more recent potential addition is Slack cofounder Stewart Butterfield, who sold the platform to Salesforce for $27.7 billion in 2021.

Notable examples of female-founded startups being acquired for $1 billion or more include IT Cosmetics cofounder and CEO Jamie Kern Lima, who sold her brand to beauty giant L'Oréal for $1.2 billion in 2016.

Some of the richest men in the world, however, including Luckey's old boss, Mark Zuckerberg, don't make the cut. Despite his reported $216 billion net worth, Zuckerberg wouldn't qualify because he never sold his company. The same goes for Bill Gates, Sam Altman, and Warren Buffett.

As a decadelong member of the group, Luckey confirmed that the successful businessmen in the thread are indeed talking about money.

Luckey, who's worth an estimated $2.5 billion after confounding the defense-tech startup Anduril, told Diamandis that he's tried to "shame" his fellow wealthy founders into doing more with their fortunes.

He said he's asked the group chat, "Guys, you have so much money. Why are you not doing what you know is the right thing to do with this capital?"

As far as what he means by "the right thing," according to Luckey, his groupmates should execute their vision of "how the world should be" themselves instead of trusting others, be it employees or nonprofits, to know what to do with their money.

Luckey said he's managed to change some of his peers' perspectives on their spending, while others are content with driving vintage race cars. Not all ultrawealthy men aspire to be Batman and use their money to shape the world as they see fit, he said.

"I'm not saying everyone should become a vigilante crime fighter, but why wouldn't you use your resources to do the thing that you know needs to be done?" Luckey said.

• Mark Zuckerberg says founders today should take advantage of a tool he didn't have when he started Facebook: AI.
• The Meta CEO says technologies like AI can help today's entrepreneurs do more with smaller teams.
• Other tech executives have shared similar sentiments.

Mark Zuckerberg said today's founders and entrepreneurs should take advantage of the technology he couldn't when he was building Facebook two decades ago.

"If you were starting whatever you're starting 20 years ago, you would have had to have built up all these different competencies inside your company, and now there are just great platforms to do it," the Meta CEO said said at the Stripe Sessions conference this week.

Zuckerberg says using technologies like AI can help today's founders "focus on the core idea" of a company.

"I think that this is just going to lead to much better quality stuff that gets created around the world because now you're just being able to have these, like, very small talent-dense teams that are, like, passionate about an idea," Zuckerberg said.

Replacing the 'midlevel engineer'

Zuckerberg has talked about the effect of AI on much larger companies, including Meta, on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast in January.

"Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of midlevel engineer that you have at your company that can write code," he said.

Of course, LLMs have been known to have troubling hallucinations at times, and companies could see negative repercussions from hollowing out their mid-level engineer ranks.

"Ease of use is a double-edged sword," Harry Law, an AI researcher at the University of Cambridge, previously told BI. "Beginners can make fast progress, but it might prevent them from learning about system architecture or performance."

Using AI too extensively in coding could also make scaling or debugging difficult, he warned.

"Security vulnerabilities may also slip through without proper code review," he said.

Still, companies are finding ways to charge ahead with AI

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan said in a CNBC interview in March that "vibe coding" will help startups stay leaner by allowing smaller teams of engineers to produce work that would otherwise take a team of 50 to 100 developers.

"I mean, the wild thing is people are getting to a million dollars to 10 million dollars a year revenue with under 10 people, and that's really never happened before in early stage venture," he said.

"You can just talk to the large language models and they will code entire apps," Tan continued. "You don't have to hire someone to do it."

Vibe coding, the hot new buzzword in the valley, was coined by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy in a post on X in February.

"There's a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding,' where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists," Karpathy wrote in his post. "I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding — I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works."

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke recently told managers that before asking to hire someone new, they must prove AI couldn't do the job better alone.

In March, Anthropic cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei said AI could be "writing essentially all of the code" in 12 months' time.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in the company's third-quarter earnings call in October that more than 25% of the new code created at the company is generated by AI and then checked by employees.

Pichai said using AI to code boosted the company's "productivity and efficiency."

"This helps our engineers do more and move faster," Pichai said.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in early February that he expected software engineering would look "very different" at the end of 2025.

The use of AI at large tech companies to aid, expedite, or outright do their employees' work dovetails with the industry's growing focus on efficiency in recent years.

Zuckerberg proclaimed 2023 a "year of efficiency" for the company, which has seen several rounds of mass layoffs in recent years. Several of its peers have also slashed thousands of jobs as they focus on flattening their organizational structures and pushing out their "lowest performers."

• Companies continue to lay off managers.
• Match Group, Amazon, Google, and Meta are thinning out middle managers, flattening org charts.
• Mark Zuckerberg was an early advocate of the "Great Flattening," describing it as an overhiring fix.

"How many managers to have — what are the pros and cons of managers?" The question was posed to Mark Zuckerberg nearly two years ago during an interview with the podcaster Lex Fridman.

At the time, the Meta CEO — still sporting his shorter "Caesar" haircut — had kicked off the "Great Flattening" trend, culling middle managers amid his "year of efficiency" as a correction to overhiring during the pandemic.

But as companies beyond Big Tech, the latest being the Tinder owner Match Group, pare back managerial roles, Zuckerberg's answer to the podcaster's question in June 2023 remains relevant — and helps explain why CEOs continue to thin out management ranks.

The Facebook founder began by acknowledging that managers are an important component of a company like Meta.

"I believe a lot in management," he said. "I think there are some people who think that it doesn't matter as much, but look, we have a lot of younger people at the company. For them, this is their first job, and people need to grow and learn in their career."

Zuckerberg said there was "a mathematical way" he thought about the ratio of employees to managers and making cuts.

Before Meta's layoffs, Zuckerberg said he had asked about the average number of direct reports each manager had at the company and learned it was about three to four. He said he felt it should be more like seven to eight. The lower numbers made sense at the time, Zuckerberg said, as Meta was hiring a ton and helping newcomers ramp up.

"So in a world where we're not adding so many people as quickly, is it as valuable to have a lot of managers who have extra capacity waiting for new people? No, right?" Zuckerberg said.

He said he decided to "defragment the organization," thinning out the ranks of middle management, which "decreases the latency on information going up and down the chain and I think empowers people more."

It all added up to a leaner organization that he felt could move faster in both decision-making and execution.

Elsewhere in the interview, Zuckerberg mentioned that the cuts came at a time of uncertainty in the world. As companies navigate geopolitical tensions and President Donald Trump's trade war, Zuckerberg's words in 2023 likely ring true to many CEOs today.

"I just feel the external world is quite volatile right now," Zuckerberg said in the interview. "And I wanted to make sure that we had a stable position."

Middle managers have increasingly found a target on their backs in recent years. Massive companies have followed Meta's lead over the past year, with Amazon and Google moving to flatten their org charts amid a renewed focus on greater efficiency.

Their CEOs have similarly voiced their reasons.

At Amazon, CEO Andy Jassy said in September that the company would increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of March.

"Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today," he said at the time. In short, he told employees in a November all-hands, "I hate bureaucracy."

Google is cutting manager, director, and vice president roles by 10%, CEO Sundar Pichai told employees in December.

Pichai said Google had made changes designed to simplify the company and boost its efficiency, two employees who heard the CEO's comments previously told Business Insider. In September 2022, he'd said he wanted Google to be 20% more efficient; months later, the company conducted a massive round of layoffs, eliminating 12,000 jobs.

"Over the past two years we've seen periods of dramatic growth," Pichai told staff in an email about those layoffs. "To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today."

Salesforce in 2023 slashed some layers of management and turned some managers into individual contributors, with the goal of reducing the "spans" and "layers of control" across the company. Earlier that year, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced layoffs of 10% of the workforce as part of a cost-cutting restructuring plan. In his memo to staff, he cited pandemic overhiring and a "challenging" economic environment as reasons for the cuts.

Middle managers made up nearly one-third of layoffs among white-collar workers in 2023, an analysis by Live Data Technologies for Bloomberg found.

Match Group, the parent company of dating apps like Tinder and Hinge, announced this week a 13% reduction in its workforce, affecting one in five managers.

Beyond tech, the focus on flattening has extended to behemoths of other industries.

Citi in 2023 announced it was paring back its layers of management from 13 to eight; the company later announced cuts affecting 1,500 managerial roles. At the start of 2024, UPS said it was laying off 12,000 of its 85,000 managers.

Some workplace experts have said the Great Flattening targeting middle managers could hurt workforces, as middle managers often carry out vital responsibilities like executing on upper management's goals and boosting employees' morale and performance.

The trend is continuing as companies decide that restructuring to decrease the number of managers is the right move to appease investors who are zeroed in on efficiency, especially after the pandemic hiring boom in tech.

Or as Zuckerberg previously said:

"I don't think you want a management structure that's just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work."

• Mark Zuckerberg lifted the lid on his management style at Stripe's Sessions conference.
• Zuckerberg said a "core army" of up to 30 people is tasked with running about 15 product groups.
• He doesn't like delegating or managing people and doesn't have regular one-on-ones with his direct reports.

Forget the typical CEO playbook — Mark Zuckerberg runs Meta on his own terms.

The Meta chief, speaking during a Tuesday fireside chat with Stripe cofounder John Collison, said he doesn't enjoy managing people or delegating.

While he doesn't have 60 direct reports like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, the two tech titans do have one thing in common: they don't have recurring one-on-one meetings with their top leaders.

During the Stripe Sessions fireside chat, Zuckerberg opened up about his hands-on, no-frills approach, a key part of which is having a "core army" of handpicked lieutenants and just a few direct reports.

A 'core army' of 25 to 30 people runs Meta

Zuckerberg favors a non-hierarchical structure at Meta, which he organizes thematically.

"Our management team is not really just my direct reports, it's sort of this broader group of like 25 to 30 people who I try to include in everything," Zuckerberg said. He added that this "core army" is empowered to get anything done across the company, and that he makes sure this inner circle is up to speed on what's going on inside Meta.

"Those people are all brilliant and I work with them super closely, but I also go directly to the people who are running whatever the thing is that I care about, so we're very non-hierarchical in that way," he explained.

Zuckerberg said Meta is divided into around 15 product groups, covering everything from Facebook and Instagram to its ad system and virtual reality.

He outlined how each group is led by its own executive. The leaders of Meta's app-based products report to Chris Cox, the chief product officer. Heads of cross-functional services, such as ads, infrastructure, and integrity systems, report to Meta's chief operating officer, Javier Olivan. And leaders working on future technology platforms report to Andrew Bosworth, the company's chief technology officer.

Zuck doesn't have many direct reports

Zuckerberg views the people in charge of the 15 product groups as "the people who are running the real things" and shared that he doesn't want to have 15 direct reports, which is why they report to other members of the management team.

"I don't have 60 direct reports, I don't even like managing people," Zuckerberg told Collison.

Zuckerberg also isn't interested in micromanaging. He said, "I think if you're going to report to me, you need to be able to manage yourself."

He doesn't believe in delegation

The Meta CEO rejects the idea that leadership is about hiring people and delegating tasks to them. Instead, he prefers to stay closely involved in critical decisions.

"I just don't believe in delegating," he said. "I think that that's generally a good way for founders to operate. If you're running the company and you're on the hook for everything and there's something that's important at whatever level of detail in the organization, I don't get the logic of saying 'I'm not going to be involved in that.'"

He added, "You want to have humility and know that if you're diving into some decision, you may not have the most context immediately, but I generally think that you want to be able to just have the cultural expectation that things are not going to be so hierarchical and you're just going to dive into whatever you want."

No recurring one-on-one meetings

Zuckerberg said he tries to minimize standing meetings and has just two weekly recurring meetings with a small group. One is an open-ended strategy discussion, and the other focuses on company priorities.

He said, "When I say I don't have one-on-ones, I don't have recurring scheduled one-on-ones, I talk to all these people constantly, more than they want to talk to me I'm sure, but I do it when I have something that I want to talk to them about, or if they want to talk to me I try to generally keep a bunch of time open."

He also tries to ensure that he has a block of time each day to focus on key tasks, or he will "get really frustrated" and be in a "bad mood."

He said, "It's like, you have too many days like that in a row and I just like explode, so I think you want to make sure that you keep a meaningful amount of your time open so that way you can just go talk to the people that you want to either about whatever you want to get done or whatever you want to learn about about what's going on in the organization," he said.

Meta didn't immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

• I went to Meta's first AI developer event and left underwhelmed.
• Developers, spectators, and even Mark Zuckerberg seemed to agree that Llama is second to competitors.
• Meta's AI efforts gained Wall Street praise, but its future rests on developer adoption.

On the manicured lawns outside Building 21 on Meta's sprawling Menlo Park headquarters, live llamas meandered with languid indifference, drawing clusters of developers who momentarily abandoned technical discussions for selfies with the stoic, woolly ambassadors of Meta's family of large language models.

Inside Building 21, I shivered. The cavernous auditorium's air conditioning was cranked up high. Mood lighting bathed the space in Meta's signature blue shade, and dance music blasted from speakers, lending a nightclub ambiance to the event that clashed oddly with the earnest, tech-focused agenda.

"Rise and shine!" a Meta PR person chirped as I took a seat.

This was LlamaCon, Meta's first-ever conference for AI developers. Its timing felt oddly defensive. Earlier this year, DeepSeek, an open-source AI model from China that delivered groundbreaking performance with computational efficiency, had much of Silicon Valley, including Meta's AI division, panicked.

Around the same time, Meta announced that it would spend $65 billion in 2025 to build out AI infrastructure. Weeks after that, the company released Llama 4, the latest version of its LLM family. Mark Zuckerberg called it "the beginning of a new era for the Llama ecosystem." Almost immediately after, Meta was accused of artificially inflating Llama models' performance benchmarks, a claim that executives pushed back against.

LlamaCon, I thought, was Meta's moment to reclaim trust and clarify its AI strategy.

Onstage, Meta's Chief Product Officer Chris Cox framed the company's open source strategy as principled rather than reactive: "We were a startup once, too," he said in the keynote. "We built this place on open source."

The subtext was clear: Meta wants developers to see Llama as their path to autonomy and flexibility in an increasingly closed AI ecosystem dominated by offerings from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google.

Llama knelt to competitors

LlamaCon featured several announcements, including the launch of a new Llama API that Meta says will make it easy for developers to integrate its models using familiar tools and interfaces. Some tasks will be possible with just a few lines of code.

Meta also announced partnerships with companies to make AI run faster; a security program with AT&T and others to fight AI-generated scams; and $1.5 million in grants to startups and universities around the world using Llama.

Conspicuously absent, however, was what many developers had actually come hoping to see: a new reasoning model to compete with what has rapidly become table stakes in the AI industry, including in Chinese open-source alternatives like DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen.

In a conversation with Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, Zuckerberg seemed to tacitly acknowledge these shortcomings.

"Part of the value around open source is that you can mix and match," he said. "If another model, like DeepSeek, is better, or if Qwen is better at something, then, as developers, you have the ability to take the best parts of the intelligence from different models. This is part of how I think open source basically passes in quality all the closed source [models]…[It] feels like sort of an unstoppable force."

Vineeth Sai Varikuntla, a developer working on medical AI applications, echoed this sentiment when I spoke with him after the keynote.

"It would be exciting if they were beating Qwen and DeepSeek," he said. "I think they will come out with a model soon. But right now the model that they have should be on par—" he paused, reconsidering, "Qwen is ahead, way ahead of what they are doing in general use cases and reasoning."

Missing model improvements

The online reaction to LlamaCon reflected similar disappointment across developer communities.

On Reddit's r/LocalLLaMA, the top post was titled "No new models in LlamaCon announced." Users compared Meta unfavorably to Qwen 3, which Alibaba strategically released just one day before Meta's event.

"Good lord. Llama went from competitively good Open Source to just so far behind the race that I'm beginning to think Qwen and DeepSeek can't even see it in their rear view mirror anymore," wrote one user. Others debated whether Meta had planned to release a reasoning model but pulled back after seeing Qwen's performance.

On Hacker News, a popular forum for developers and tech industry professionals, some criticized the event's focus on API services and partnerships rather than model improvements as "super shallow." And one user on Threads summed up the event simply as "kinda mid."

When I asked Meta how they measured the success of the event, they declined to comment.

"It did seem like a bit of a marketing push for Llama," Mahesh Sathiamoorthy, cofounder of Bespoke Labs, a Mountain View-based startup that creates AI tools for data curation and training LLMs, told me. "They wanted to cast a wider net and appeal to enterprises, but I think the technical community was looking for more substantial model improvements."

Still, LlamaCon won praise from Wall Street analysts tracking the company's AI strategy. "LlamaCon was one giant flex of Meta's ambitions and successes with AI," Mike Proulx of Forrester told me.

Jefferies analyst Brent Thill called Meta's announcement at the event "a big step forward" to becoming a "hyperscaler, a term referring to large cloud serve providers that offer computing resources and infrastructure to businesses.

Some developers using Llama models were equally enthusiastic about the technology's benefits. For Yevhenii Petrenko of Tavus, which creates AI-powered conversational videos, Llama's speed was crucial. "We really care about very low latency, like very fast response, and Llama helps us use other LLMs," he told me after the event.

Hanzla Ramey, CTO of WriteSea, an AI-powered career services platform that helps job seekers prepare résumés and practice interviews, highlighted Llama's cost-effectiveness: "For us, cost is huge," he told me. "We are a startup, so controlling expenses is really important. If we go with closed source, we can't process millions of jobs. No way."

The future's form and function

Toward the end of the day, Zuckerberg joined Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella onstage for a wide-ranging chat about AI's future. One comment stood out.

Llama 4, Zuckerberg explained, had been designed around Meta's preferred infrastructure — the H100 GPU, which shaped its architecture and scale. But he acknowledged that "a lot of the open source community wants even smaller models." Developers "just need things in different shapes," he said.

"To be able to basically take whatever intelligence you have from bigger models," he added, "and distill them into whatever form factor you want — to be able to run on your laptop, on your phone, on whatever the thing is…to me, this is one of the most important things," he said.

It was a candid admission. For all the pageantry, LlamaCon wasn't a coronation. It was Meta still mid-pivot, trying to convince developers — and maybe itself — that it can build not just models, but momentum.

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• Tech leaders are getting closer to Trump, prompting questions about Silicon Valley's politics.
• Mark Zuckerberg said it's necessary to have a productive relationship with the government.
• He has previously criticized the Biden administration's relationship with Meta.

High-profile tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg have largely embraced President Donald Trump since he won a second term, with many of them making large donations to the president's inaugural fund and socializing among MAGA world at Mar-a-Lago.

Podcaster Dwarkesh Patel asked the Meta CEO to elaborate on his connection to Trump during a Tuesday interview.

"Our default as an American company should be to try to have a productive relationship with whoever is running the government," Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago the day before Thanksgiving in 2024, and he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with his fellow tech billionaires at Trump's inauguration in January.

He told Patel that Meta's attempts to work with the Biden administration didn't pan out.

"I've been pretty public with some of my frustrations with the previous administration — how they basically did not engage with us or the business community more broadly," he said.

In August, Zuckerberg called out the Biden administration, saying Meta was pressured to remove Facebook posts related to COVID-19 by the government. Zuckerberg said at the time he regretted not pushing back on the White House.

A strong relationship between Big Tech and the government is "necessary" for progress, Zuckerberg told Patel on Tuesday.

"It's like we're trying to build great stuff," he said. "That's sort of that's how I see it, and it's also how I would guess most others see it."

A spokesperson for Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

• Mark Zuckerberg envisions a future where holograms could replace physical screens.
• Meta's AI-powered Ray-Bans and Orion glasses aim to merge digital and physical worlds.
• Zuck said he's hoping to release its AR glasses in four years or less.

Mark Zuckerberg is on a mission to combine the physical and digital worlds — and he's leaving screens out of it.

The future of tech is heading away from them and toward holograms that eliminate the need for the "small glowing rectangle" in your hand, Zuckerberg told Theo Von on the "This Past Weekend" podcast.

"All this digital stuff should just basically be holograms. You shouldn't need a physical screen," Zuckerberg said.

His big solution? Glasses.

Meta has seen a positive response to its AI-powered smart Ray-Bans and is working on upping its wearables arsenal with the Orion augmented-reality glasses. That high-powered eyewear, which isn't yet available for purchase, allows users to view digital images while seeing the world around them. It's a step forward from owning a TV, smartphone, or computer, he told Von.

In a separate Tuesday interview with Dwarkesh Patel, he said, "It's like this huge physical thing, and that's what the holographic overlays allow you to do."

Facebook, Zuckerberg's brainchild, has been a game changer in social media. Meta has also grown its online presence with the additions of Instagram and Threads. It's set to release quarterly earnings Wednesday.

However, Orion is still years away, and its competitors currently include bulkier AR headset options. Zuckerberg told Von that the computer glasses, which reportedly cost $10,000 per pair for Meta to make, are between four and eight years away from production — but he's hoping for four or fewer.

In the real world, "you don't want your physical space to be cluttered," he said. "It wears on you psychologically."

Zuckerberg said he figures it works similarly when it comes to screens and the digital space.

• Mark Zuckerberg said his statue of his wife Priscilla Chan was not that well-received.
• Chan wasn't "that happy" about having a 7-foot sculpture of herself in their yard, Zuckerberg said.
• Zuckerberg has an estimated net worth of $184 billion, according to Forbes.

What sort of gift should you buy your wife if you're billionaire? Not a 7-foot sculpture in her likeness, Mark Zuckerberg said.

The internet went wild when he unveiled a silver and turquoise statue of his wife, Priscilla Chan, in August. However, Chan wasn't as pleased with his towering tribute, the Meta CEO told Theo Von in an episode of the "This Past Weekend" podcast.

"I don't think she was that happy with it," the 40-year-old told Von.

They aren't big on extravagant dates, Zuckerberg said, so he tends to use his inventive mind for grand gestures. Chan was a "good sport" and appreciative of the effort and creativity that went into the statue, he added. However, this gesture was a miss.

"She doesn't want a sculpture of her in the front lawn — that's weird," Zuckerberg said.

It didn't appear to be for any particular occasion, like a birthday or their wedding anniversary. At the time, his post said he was "bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife."

Yet Zuckerberg, the person who commissioned the statue, asked Von, "Who wants a sculpture of themselves in the front yard?"

His tribute had an additional motive, however, he said. As a fan of artist Daniel Arsham's work, Zuckerberg sought him out to collaborate on the project. He decided to use Chan, his college sweetheart, as the muse, "partially because that's cool" but also because it'd be "crazy" to make a sculpture of himself.

"She's kind of the target of my creative energy," the billionaire said.

In October, Zuckerberg revealed a customized Porsche Cayenne Turbo GT for Chan and their three daughters. The "side quest," as he described at the time came about because Chan wanted a minivan. On Monday's episode, Zuckerberg told Von that he also worked on it because he likes cars but didn't want to design a "super car" for himself.

His sculpture post sparked discussions and memes about what Zuck might've done to warrant a custom statue as an apology, but he said they've got it all wrong. The sculpture is the transgression.

"You're going to have to wait and see what I have to do to make up having made a sculpture and putting it in our front lawn," Zuckerberg said.

• Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard University as a sophomore to focus on Facebook.
• The Meta CEO met his wife, Priscilla Chan, and friends who helped start Facebook in college.
• Zuckerberg told Theo Von that he's unsure if college prepares people enough for the workforce.

In a recent interview, Harvard University dropout Mark Zuckerberg said that he's not sure if colleges are preparing students enough for today's job market.

"I'm not sure that college is preparing people for like the jobs that they need to have today," Zuckerberg said in an interview with comedian Theo Von published on Monday. "I think there's a big issue on that and like all the student debt issues are like really big issues."

The Meta CEO said that college could be a formative "social experience" for students, as many leave home for the first time. Still, some people will have to decide whether higher education is worth going into debt.

"It would be one thing if it were just kind of like a social experience," he said. "If it's not preparing you for the jobs that you need and you're kind of starting off in this big hole, then I think that's not good. That I think there's gonna have to be a reckoning with and people are gonna have to kind of figure whether that makes sense."

According to data from CollegeBoard, the average student loan debt for those who graduated in 2022-23 was $29,3000 per borrower. Gen Z graduates this year face a tough job market amid layoffs in the tech and government sectors.

One 2024 study from Deloitte showed that a third of Gen Z and millennials opt out of higher education due to costs and career choices that don't require a degree.

"It's sort of been this taboo thing to say of like, maybe not everyone needs to go to college because there's, like, a lot of jobs that don't require that," Zuckerberg said. "But I think people are probably coming around to that opinion a little more now than maybe like 10 years ago."

Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in 2005 while a sophomore to focus on growing Facebook. Twelve years later, he received an honorary degree.

The CEO said in the interview that he met many people in college "who are really important in my life," including his wife, Priscilla Chan, Facebook cofounders, and people who are still close friends.

"It was good, I feel like you need some time kind of away from home a bit before you like, fully go out," he said of his time at boarding school and college.

When asked if students should be learning about artificial intelligence in middle or high school, Zuckerberg said technology changes a lot and that he's not using the same skills he learned when he was 15. Still, he added that there could be value in "understanding the technology and understanding how to use it."

Zuckerberg also said having good mentors or teachers is valuable, regardless of the class.

"When I was in boarding school, I really liked studying Latin and Greek, and that's like, not useful for any practical thing," he said, "But it's fun."

A Meta spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

• Mark Zuckerberg said he avoids caffeine and drugs in his daily life.
• He prefers to experience reality with an unaltered state of mind, he said.
• "DARE really worked on me," Zuckerberg told Theo Von in an interview.

Mark Zuckerberg seems pretty strict about what he puts in his body.

The billionaire Meta CEO said he isn't a fan of caffeine — or any other mind-altering substance, for that matter — during an interview on the comedian Theo Von's "This Past Weekend" podcast. Instead, he prefers to experience life as it is without the help of "chemicals," Zuckerberg told Von.

His sister, he said, calls him out regularly for "rawdogging reality." Zuckerberg told Von that he doesn't do drugs and typically drinks coffee only recreationally — on vacation, for example.

Instead, Zuck jump-starts his mornings by fighting, which works "better than caffeine," he said. He spends two hours in the morning practicing mixed martial arts to "recenter" himself so he can deal with his duties as the head of one of the largest companies in the world, he added.

While his tech peers, including Elon Musk and Bill Gates, have gone on the record about using cannabis, acid, or ketamine, Zuckerberg's substances of choice include creatine and vitamins. Von said abstaining from drugs is edgier than using them these days.

When Von asked about drug use, Zuckerberg said his upbringing steered him away. He credited Drug Abuse Resistance Education — an antidrug program prominent in the 1980s and '90s — with shaping his view of controlled substances.

"DARE really worked on me when I was in third grade," Zuckerberg said. "It really scared me."

• Meta's AI chatbots are under scrutiny for allowing sexual talk with teens (as the John Cena chatbot, no less).
• Meta doesn't make money directly from people talking to user-generated AI chatbots.
• So why doesn't it just get rid of them? They're only causing problems.

If I were running Meta, I'd do a few things differently, starting with improving Facebook Marketplace search. But one big thing I'd do on day one? Get rid of all those user-generated AI companion chatbots. They're only going to be a headache for Meta.

Some examples of just how big a potential headache came in The Wall Street Journal's recent report on how Meta's celebrity-voiced AI chatbots could be pushed into sexualized roleplay — even with users who said they were teenagers.

Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz found that with the right cajoling, an account posing as a 14-year-old user could get the bot voiced by John Cena to engage in roleplay chats where it pretended to get arrested on charges of statutory rape. (Meta added a bunch of AI chatbots last year that are voiced by real celebrities, including the WWE star.)

Obviously, this is bad. Meta told the WSJ: "The use-case of this product in the way described is so manufactured that it's not just fringe, it's hypothetical." It's a bad look for Meta, and although John Cena didn't respond to a request for comment in the WSJ story, I think we can assume he's not thrilled there was an AI-generated version of his voice pretending to seduce a teen.

The article reports that Mark Zuckerberg personally pushed for these AI chatbots to be loosened up.

Zuckerberg was reluctant to impose any additional limits on teen experiences, initially vetoing a proposal to limit "companionship" bots so that they would be accessible only to older teens.

After an extended lobbying campaign that enlisted more senior executives late last year, however, Zuckerberg approved barring registered teen accounts from accessing user-created bots, according to employees and contemporaneous documents.

A Meta spokesman denied that Zuckerberg had resisted adding safeguards.

A spokesperson for Meta told Business Insider that any sexual content with the celebrity-voiced AIs is a tiny fraction of their overall use, and that changes have already been made to prevent younger users from engaging in the kind of stuff that was reported in the Journal.

But as much as it's eye-popping to see the chats from AI John Cena saying dirty things, I think there's a much bigger thing going on. The user-generated chatbots in Meta AI are a mess. Looking over the most popular ones, they're often romance-oriented, with beautiful women as the image.

Here's what comes up on my "Discover AIs" page:

(To be clear, I'm not talking about the Meta AI assistant that shows up when you search on Instagram or Facebook — there's a pretty clear utility for that. I'm talking about the character ones used for fun/romance.)

If I were running Meta, I'd want to stay as far away from the companion chatbot business as possible. These seem like a pretty bad business for an everything-to-everyone company like Meta — not necessarily a bad business financially, but a pretty thorny business ethically. It's one that will probably lead to more and more bad headlines.

Last fall, a parent sued one of the leading roleplay AI services. She said her teenage son killed himself after becoming entangled with an AI companion. The company, Character.ai, filed a motion to dismiss the case in a hearing on Monday. A representative for Character.ai told BI on Monday that it wouldn't comment on pending litigation. A statement said its goal was "to provide an engaging and safe platform."

Proponents of AI chatbots have argued that they provide positive experiences for emotional exploration, fun, or nice things.

But my opinion is that these roleplay chatbots are appealing mainly to two vulnerable groups: young people and the desperately lonely. And those are not the two groups that Meta should want to be in the business of serving a new-ish technology that it doesn't know the ramifications of.

There isn't clear research on how these chatbots might affect younger teens or adults who are vulnerable in some way (depressed, struggling, etc.).

I recently spoke Ying Xu, assistant professor of AI in learning education at Harvard, about what the current research into kids using chatbots looks like.

"There are studies that have started to explore the link between ChatGPT/LLMs and short-term outcomes, like learning a specific concept or skill with AI," she told me over email. "But there's less evidence on long-term emotional outcomes, which require more time to develop and observe."

There's plenty of anecdotal evidence that suggests emotional investment in an AI chatbot can go wrong.

The New York Times reported on an adult woman who spent $200 a month she couldn't afford on an upgraded version of an AI chatbot she had romantic feelings for. I don't think anyone would come away from that story thinking this is a good or healthy thing.

It seems to me like Meta sees that AI is the future, and character chatbots are currently a popular thing that other AI companies are doing. It doesn't want to be left behind.

But Meta might want to think hard about whether character chatbots are something it wants to be involved in at all — or if this is a nightmare that is just going to result in more bad headlines, more potential lawsuits, more lawmakers grilling executives over harms to kids and vulnerable adults.

Maybe it's just not worth it.

• Several tech billionaires attended or donated to Trump's inauguration in January.
• Four of the richest have lost a collective $194 billion in wealth since Trump took office.
• Tech leaders who attend Trump's inauguration have also seen declines in their company's share price.

It's been almost 100 days since President Donald Trump was sworn into office with some of the biggest names in tech near his side.

Several tech billionaires cozied up to Trump ahead of his second term in part by attending the inauguration and donating to the inaugural fund. The appearance of a joint front stood in contrast to years of Trump criticizing Big Tech and calling out some tech leaders directly.

A lot has changed since Inauguration Day. Tech leaders who supported Trump have seen both their net worths and the stock value of the companies they lead decline, as the administration's tariff-fueled trade war has coincided with a disruption in financial markets worldwide.

Four of the richest tech billionaires who attended the inauguration or donated to it — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jensen Huang — have lost a collective $193.6 billion since January 20, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Here's how much each tech billionaire has lost, according to Bloomberg's net worth estimates as of market close on Monday.

Elon Musk

Net worth on January 20: $449 billion

Net worth on April 28: $335 billion

Loss: $114 billion

Musk, the tech billionaire who's gotten closer to Trump more than any other as an advisor, has seen the greatest decline in wealth, though he remains the world's richest person.

Musk's work with the White House DOGE office led to swift backlash and a wave of protests against Tesla. The electric-vehicle maker has been struggling, with its stock price down nearly 25% this year.

After Tesla reported lackluster quarterly earnings last week, Musk announced he would be stepping back from DOGE in May, spending just one or two days a week on government matters. He has consistently defended his work with the White House to eliminate waste and fraud in government.

Jeff Bezos

Net worth on January 20: $245 billion

Net worth on April 28: $209 billion

Loss: $36 billion

Bezos's wealth, most of which is tied to stock in Amazon, the company he founded, has declined sharply since February.

Analysts have said Amazon is especially at risk of being negatively impacted by Trump's trade war, including the 145% tariff on China, due to the number of products sold on the site, either directly or through third-parties, that come from the country.

Some Amazon sellers have been raising prices on goods like appliances, snacks, and electronics, though the company has said it represents a small fraction of the total amount of goods sold on the site.

Mark Zuckerberg

Net worth on January 20: $217 billion

Net worth on April 28: $195 billion

Loss: $22 billion

Zuckerberg may have had the worst relationship with Trump compared to any other tech billionaire prior to the election. Trump had repeatedly lashed out against the Meta CEO on Truth Social and suggested he should be investigated or jailed after Facebook temporarily banned Trump's account following the January 6 Capitol riot.

Meta, the primary source of Zuckerberg's wealth, has been fighting an anti-trust lawsuit brought by the government that has not gone away under Trump. Zuckerberg earlier this month sat for three days of testimony after the antitrust trial opened.

The Meta CEO testified for more than 10 hours and was grilled by the FTC's lead attorney.

Jensen Huang

Net worth on January 20: $117 billion

Net worth on April 28: $95.4 billion

Loss: $21.6 billion

While Huang did not attend the inauguration, Nvidia donated $1 million to the inaugural fund�. Huang's wealth, a majority of which is tied to Nvidia stock, has also dropped since January, when he attended the inauguration.

Nvidia stock has fallen over 21% year to date, with the company facing several setbacks that include Trump's tariffs, as the company sources a majority of its chips from overseas, primarily Taiwan.

The company also said earlier this month it expected to take a $5.5 billion hit on its first-quarter earnings as a result of the Trump administration's restrictions on its chip exports to China.

Tech leaders also saw stock declines for the companies they lead

Other tech leaders who attended the inauguration saw declines in the stock prices of the companies they lead, including Tim Cook of Apple and Sundar Pichai of Google.

Though some estimates suggest the CEOs are billionaires, they are not on Bloomberg's list of the top 500 richest people, so the change in their estimated net worth since the inauguration was not publicly available.

But Apple's share price has fallen nearly 14% this year, while the share price of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has fallen nearly 15% year over year.