what would the number look like if it weren't for this?

I don’t think that’s correct. They announced a future increase of $40 billion. And I don’t think share repurchases affects net income anyway.

Stock buybacks aren’t on the Income Statement…

Hrm, no. The $40bn they announced is forward-looking guidance for 2023. In 2022 they repurchased $28bn (2021 they repurchased $44bn) [1].

Not sure that I'd call this "admitting defeat on growth" as other people have said elsewhere in this thread, given that they've done buybacks of this magnitude before.

The main issue, it seems, is that they grew expenditures on cost of revenue and R&D (i.e. operations and capex), but revenue (advertising from family of apps, whatever revenue VR yields) did not keep pace -- in fact, it was flat on a YoY basis [2].

IMO, this doc is strong evidence that the layoffs were a bona fide good idea. Will be interesting to compare to Alphabet's tomorrow.

[1]: see the cash flow statement on page 8, the search term is "Repurchase" https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2022/q4...

[2]: revenue and income figures are broken out on page 10. costs of revenue/r&d figures on page 6.

That cash hasn't come out of the corporate treasury yet:)

Yea, I think the point-in-time, annualized R&D expense on 2023/03 will be the midpoint of the reported figure for 2022 and 20221. (~$30bn, where EOY 2022 was $35bn and EOY 2021 was $24.6bn).

The layoff, we can imagine, impacted maybe 15% of R&D at most.

It might still be too high in 2023, depending on what their revenue figures do in Q1/Q2. Would be interesting if they needed to do another layoff -- doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility.

As someone who was laid off, this is because while the announcement was in November, the WARN period meant we were all on the payroll until into 2023.

kind of interesting

covid happened, money was printed to replace lost wages but somehow it trickled up

plus people couldn't leave their house so tech companies saw booms in sales/revenue

so then inflation happened to the tune of 8% and the narrative was "if you didn't get at least an 8% raise 2019 -> 2020 -> 2021 each year you basically got a paycut"

and now we're seeing layoffs that basically feel like a reaction/counterbalance to any inflation rasies (or hires) that were given/made

"if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear it"

"if you get an inflation-sized big raise but then get laid off, did you really get a raise at all?"