Mark Zuckerberg Defends Meta’s Recent Moves, Sets Up 2025 in Leaked All-Hands Meeting

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg used an all-hands meeting Thursday that was leaked to several media outlets to prepare staff for an “intense” year ahead and address recent controversial moves, as well as to lash out against events like Thursday’s consistently being leaked.

Business Insider reviewed a recording of the meeting, during which Zuckerberg said of the coming year, “This is a marathon, not a sprint. But honestly, this year feels a little more like a sprint to me.”

Zuck and Trump

Zuckerberg echoed comments he made during the company’s fourth-quarter-2024 earnings call Wednesday regarding the administration of President Donald Trump.

“After the past several years, we now have an opportunity to have a productive partnership with the U.S. government, and we’re going to take that,” he said, as reported by Business Insider. “I think it’s the right thing to do because there are several areas, even if we don’t agree on everything, where we have common cause for things that are going to make it so that we can serve our community better, and we can advance the interests of our country together.”

Zuckerberg added that the company would not compromise its principles or values.

DEI

Meta announced earlier this month that it would scale back diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, which was seen by many as another nod to the then-incoming Trump administration.

“The way to think about this is: We’re in the middle of a pretty rapidly changing policy and regulatory landscape that increasingly views any policy that might advantage any one group of people over another as something that is unlawful, and because of that, we need to adjust, or else we’ll just be out of alignment with what the law is saying,” Zuckerberg said, as reported by Business Insider.

“Historically, we’ve had a handful of specific programs that were very focused on certain underrepresented groups,” he added, “and I think the direction of the policy and regulatory and legal direction on a lot of the stuff is that you can’t do things that advantage specific groups, even if you’re trying to make up for other things.”

Fact-checking

Meta revealed earlier this month that it would scrap its third-party fact-checking program in favor of the community notes model used by X.

Zuckerberg urged Meta staff to reserve judgment until they see how the new system is implemented, adding, “I’m actually quite optimistic that this is going to end up being a better system.”

Layoffs

“The right thing to do is just rip the Band-Aid off,” Zuckerberg said of the upcoming round of performance-based layoffs, as reported by Entrepreneur. “I think in a lot of ways, it is a nicer thing to do for people who are probably not going to end up making it, anyway.”

The company said earlier this month that it will slash 5% of its workforce, or some 3,600 employees, Feb. 10.

Artificial intelligence

As he did during the earnings call, Zuckerberg touted the Meta AI digital assistant, predicting that it will reach 1 billion users by year-end and adding, “I think whoever gets there first is going to have a long-term, durable advantage towards building one of the most important products in history.”

He also said AI agents will take over some work at the company, such as writing software. When asked whether that move would lead to more job cuts, he replied that it was “hard to know” and that while some roles may become redundant, it could result in hiring more engineers to make AI more productive, adding, “The nature of what engineering is in the future will be different than it is today.”

DeepSeek

Chinese-based open-source AI model DeepSeek came up quite a bit during the earnings call, and Zuckerberg addressed it during the all-hands meeting, saying, as reported by Entrepreneur, that he does not believe it will affect Meta’s spending on AI, but it is “interesting when there’s someone who does something better than you … We can not only observe what they did, but we can read about it and implement it, so that’ll benefit us.”

Plugging the leaks

Finally, Zuckerberg vented about events like Thursday’s all-hands consistently being leaked, saying during the meeting, as reported by 404 Media, “Everything I say leaks. And it sucks, right? I want to be able to talk about stuff openly, but I am also trying to like, well, we’re trying to build stuff and create value in the world, not destroy value by talking about stuff that inevitably leaks.”

He added, “There are a bunch of things that I think are value-destroying for me to talk about, so I’m not going to talk about those. But I think it’ll be good. You all can give us feedback later. Maybe it’s just the nature of running a company at scale, but it’s a little bit of a bummer.”

Shortly after the meeting, Meta chief information security officer Guy Rosen fired off an internal memo threatening “appropriate action, including termination,” against employees who leak information, writing, “When information is stolen or leaked, there are repercussions beyond the immediate security impact. Our teams become demoralized, and we all waste time that is better spent working on our products and toward our goals and mission.”

Naturally, the internal memo was leaked to The Verge.