Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.
Meta has... Facebook. Instagram. Threads, if you want to count it. What'sApp. The ad-tech that powers those things. A black hole of a VR division that has since been eviscerated after billions burned. An AR/device divison that sells glasses. And a burgeoning supernova of an AI division, just one singular hire of which is responsible for $1.5B in pay (over 6 years).
Google/Alphabet has........ an entire consumer hardware family ranging from cameras to doorbells to smart displays to streamers, YouTube, YouTubeTV, Android, Chrome, Google itself, Gemini, GCP, Waymo, GoogleFi, Google Fiber, Ads, Infra/Analytics, Maps, dozens of other apps... on and on.
Microsoft has Azure, Windows, Office (each of which are obviously _suites_ of more complex software), Xbox, LinkedIn, Dynamics, Surface, etc.
If anything, Apple _might_ be a slightly closer analog to Meta in that they're just a bit more limited, but their hardware engineering side is obviously a massive part of that, supply chain, software, MacOS, iOS, all of their adjacent first-party apps, App Store, iCloud, AppleTV, retail...
Meta just... isn't in the same league in terms of pure surface area. Mark just leaned extremely hard into acquiring as much nascent talent as possible and hoped he'd have the use cases to make it make sense but was content to spend the money in the meantime on looking busy. Now that CapEx has to go to compute/DCs/GWs for their AI which... kind of no one wants? But he's going to bet as much of the company as possible to stay relevant and try to be a player in the space. He's just doing it in this tail-wagging-the-dog hyper-overpay-individual-researchers approach that, from the outside at least, seems extremely risky...
The headcount analog for Google is Apple. And if you subtract out the retail employees Apple looks surprisingly efficient, having much less non-retail staff than Google (although both heavily use contractors).
Meta on the other hand...is pretty much the definition of bloat.
Well, unique other than Amazon I guess.
Not even close, if you include Office and Mail/Outlook. And if you include corporate clients, Apple is just not on the map. I've gone from a Windows first company to an Apple first company, and it's a night and day difference when you see how well integrated things were for Windows.
I mean, individually you can say Teams sucks (terrible, really). And Outlook sucks as a consumer. But the way you can get all these things working with Office was very convenient.
Heck, if I was forced to either short or invest Meta with all my retirement savings now betting on it's value in 25 years.. I'd short it.
Google, Apple and Microsoft dominate the world with their products and platforms. Facebook & WhatsApp certainly doesnt.
This is not true at all. There are two players. FB/Instagram and TikTok. Using one does not preclude using the other. Other than tiktok, who was the last new player in social?
> Google, Apple and Microsoft dominate the world with their products and platforms. Facebook & WhatsApp certainly doesnt.
Whole countries literally run on WhatsApp.
There are all kinds of social media, its segmented by userbase, and culture/geography.
Telegram has 1B users (which is surprising to me, I thought it was an ex-Soviet thing), and there are entire geographic strongholds, such as Russia and China.
Russia and China still use iPhones and Windows, but entirely skipped out on Facebook and Whatsapp.
Your own link has Meta with 3 of the top 4 platforms. Can you really see any of the competitors overtaking them in even the medium term?
> Russia and China still use iPhones and Windows, but entirely skipped out on Facebook and Whatsapp.
China doesn't use Google either, and while they might use Windows they're staying off Azure which is where Microsoft's main business is these days.
Yes there are countries which stay off Meta. But they are just as embedded in the workings of the world as any of the companies you mentioned, probably more so. Government decisions are made by people using a mix of Apple, Google and Microsoft hardware - but all of them are communicating over WhatsApp.
And for all the scorn it gets on HN, Facebook still works for some of my use cases: high school friends, low-contact relatives, obscure geography groups, the Philippines.
Not a good idea. Meta has hundreds of leavers to find more profits from anywhere.
Short of social media being classified as something like alcohol or cigarettes, you will lose money on this trade. You’re betting against ingrained human nature.
Apple / Google and as I hate to admit are innovators of the modern tech world. While they've bought their fair-share they still produce and create and have existed prior 00's. Two devices dominate the market and it's not going to change any time soon.
You either use iOS or Google. Urgh, this is how the world has become. Windows or Linux, X or Y; why did Z have to die.
What Google innovated during the last decade?
like literally they lucked out on the landing the business model early but it feels it has been in an ongoing decline and everything else they have tried has failed spectacularly (and particularly things Mark has put his whole weight behind)
They never became anything more than the ad company
Meta had ~100B in EBITDA (or 60B in net income) for 2025. What critique does he need from a product/business standpoint?
The continual success of fb and instagram has not come from zuck but through glorified A/B testing on steroids whilst lighting employee’s asses on fire each quarter to move the metrics. Visionary genius? My ass. Only Steve Jobs proved he is worthy of that title.
Bro is a fraud. He always was - remember he stole the idea for fb. Thankfully he’s getting found out.
>I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.
Do we really need to discuss this? He tried to screw another founder - the Brazilian - who got a pay off and now has a reported net worth in the billions.
honestly - meta has built quite a lot of cool things, but c-suite is probably to be blamed for what's going on today.
This is before Google.
Nobody else has this targeted focus.
Google bought Android before it had released products.
Google Maps was purchased, but was Where 2 actually a successful product prior to that?
But just wanted to correct for the historical record:
> Where 2 had a successful product, it just wasn't web based (nor do I think free), so didn't have anywhere near the distribution that Google enabled once the team ported it to run in a browser.
Where 2 did not have a product, successful or not. They were an unreleased demo looking for investors and luckily got into a room with Larry Page of 2004.
Meta has not shown the second part.
You said
> buying a successful business and keeping it successful for over a decade.
Meta bought already successful companies.
Google has purchased successful businesses, but they also purchased companies that weren't and managed to get them into massive money makers.
I’m no Zuck fan, but he’s done much more than keep them successful, they have grown a lot.
I remember everyone making fun of him for overpaying for IG and WA. Now both in hindsight look like amazing acquisitions.
In 2012, everyone around me was lauging at the absurdity of a 0 revenue photo app getting acquired for $1bn. My peers/superiors in the ad business thought Facebook would flail in digital marketing. Oops.
The metaverse might be a big pile of bollocks, but isn't the whole point of being a billionaire to indulge peculiar unpopular obsessions?
They tried organically to replicate instagram etc but they failed even though they had wayyyy more resources. Their attempts sucked. So their approach was to target for acquisition or copy features if they couldn’t.
There’s plenty of evidence of this re. His comms around those events.
But I suppose that doesn't count because Winklevii "never would have come up with anything anyway"
Seriously? Walk outside and see what people are holding in their hand.
Google, MSFT and Apple do a lot more and most of their products have large feature backlogs.
Different scenarios
Youtube, Gmail, Search, Maps, Android, Devices, Photos and Drive are how they get the data to make money on ads. Cloud, Android & Youtube would be a 2 trillion dollar company even without Google. They don't make money on these, because they don't need to make money on it.
WhatsApp could not change for the next 50 years, and it would continue doing that just fine.
Whatsapp had 55 employees when Facebook brought them for $19 billion.
That sounds like 2-10x too many. Think about what Google, Apple & Microsoft do compared to Meta.
- a company that makes the leading search engine, the leading browser, one of the two major mobile OSes, one of the major desktop OSes, some of the best ai hardware, and is in the running to win the ai race
- a company that makes the leading mobile and desktop OSes and the leading desktop and os hardware, one of the top consumer cloud offerings, a major online media store, and a popular consumer electronics retail store
Now compare it to Meta, a company where the vast majority of revenue is essentially a few mobile apps with an advertising network. No operating systems, no processor design, and a few hardware boondoggles only 1/10000th the scale of Apple's, etc.
Now realize that, if you subtract out Apple's retail employees, they have roughly similar headcount to Meta.
Now tell me again that Apple is in a "worse" position than Meta on efficiency.
Meta bought Rivos, and as far as I can see do a ton of work related to Linux kernel stuff (I heard about this in the context of eBPF). But datacenter side, not consumer.
about half (80k) of the equivalent fulltime employees at Apple are involved in the store footprint, so they're retail staff in one of their main sales channels.
And as other's have pointed out, Apple has a far wider range of products and services than Meta, and produce far more hardware products, including their own cutting-edge SOC's. Meta, meanwhile, get Broadcom to largely produce their "custom ASIC's", not just fab, but deeply involved in design, tape out, and validation.
Meta is the youngest company of that group. Apple and Microsoft have been around for over twice as long.
Meta also has the narrowest scope of those companies.
Really it's kind of amazing that Meta has so many employees relative to those other companies given how much narrower their business is. Puts the overhiring into perspective.
Part of “Big Tech” hiring isn't just to have an important thing for everyone to do but also to keep competitors from having access to those people.
Meta might surpass Google on _digital advertising revenue_.
Google's overall revenue is still ~2x Meta's
They had 17k employees in 2016 and 80k in 2022. And given that a lot of the big tech companies looked like this albeit not quite so extreme I think it's right to say they might all have a glut of employees.
There was an old all hands I watched in 2014 where Sheryl talked about how around 8k was the largest they should ever get.
More generally I think that while sales scales linearly, engineering and product should probably be sub linear.
But both Google and Microsoft also massively overhired around the same timeframe as Meta, and are still digging themselves out of the mess of their own making. And making their teams pay for such stupidity.
So? They likely already had too many in 2021.
>They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.
Technology (hw/sw) wise, they also have 1/10 the internal tech and public product breadth and scope of Google or Apple and Microsoft. Maybe 1/50 even. They do like 4-5 social media and chat apps (that they hardly ever update anymore), and some crappy VR stuff nobody cares for.