Eurgh. I never understand how the number of employees you have can be a success metric. By that logic, becoming more efficient would be a bad thing.
Replying to your comment made me wonder: what would a better metric be? The requirements are that it has to be numeric, a single number, and represent the "success" of any company, in all lifecycles (before fit, growth, mature, yellowpages, etc.)
In another scenario, Company C has outsourced most of its operations work, while Company D does it in-house, so Company D has more employees. Again, this tells us nothing about performance.
What's wrong with using net income as a single number?
But (so as not to contradict myself) just having all those people doesn't count as an achievement. It's just a cost of doing business that you want to keep as low as possible.
Plus sales and marketing budgets are huge.
Whether any of these systems or human resource needs are required to be running at that scale is probably the question hitting Jack directly in the face. I think the ballsiest move he could make would be to shrink it all down to core services. But Wall Street would shit itself with that sort of contraction.
Yes, plenty on spam prevention, but seemingly little on bot prevention. Without the bots, there'd be so many less MAUs.
That being said, I'd be shocked if a large number of that headcount weren't marketing and ad sales associates as that is what supposedly keeps the lights on.