Yahoo Finance Live anchors discuss Meta executives pushing the limits of remote work.
Video Transcript
JARED BLIKRE: Switching gears here, don’t cry for Mark Zuckerberg. His net worth might have been slashed by a 1/3. That’s $42 billion when Meta’s stock price got cut in half. But Mark himself had been– he’s been keeping busy, working mainly away from Facebook’s Menlo Park HQ, spending more time in his plush home on Kauai’s North Shore, as well as a number of other homes around the world, and the same with a number of other Facebook execs.
And I guess, guys, it’s kind of a bit ironic because we’re preparing to go back in the office. We’re in the office, to a limited extent. And we also share a building with Facebook, who is largely absent from it, taking up most of the floor space. I haven’t been on their floors, but I imagine they’re fairly empty here. I’m just wondering what you guys are thinking about this situation.
DAVE BRIGGS: Well, I have to say–
RACHELLE AKUFFO: I think this almost comes under the hashtag– I think this almost comes under the hashtag, #mustbenice, because, obviously, it’s the executives who get to do this. And this really is part of Meta’s plan. They really want it to be this sort of remote virtual world. And they really are taking this to the extreme. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be chilling on the beach in Hawaii while doing their work?
I mean, it does get to show they are really investing in more range of technologies to make virtual work more possible. And then you also have chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg taking her sabbatical this spring of 30 days of paid leave that the company offers every five years. I wonder if this is going to promote a little bit of bitterness for everybody else, or if at some point, they, too, will get to share in the spoils of this. Dave?
DAVE BRIGGS: Yeah, it sounds like they’re giving most employees the option to at least have a hybrid model, and I think you could at least look at the numbers. They’ve trimmed $300 billion in market cap off the company, and say, well, maybe they need to be in the same place, but almost impossible to make that argument when your entire future is staked on being in the Metaverse. But yeah, having executives in Spain and the UK, in New York, in Hawaii, I think is a question a lot of international companies are going to face if they can be on the same page, if they can be as productive.
As for what’s hurting Meta, it is clearly, in my estimation, nothing to do with this and a lot more to do with the Apple privacy changes that just devastated the business model there at Facebook, and in particular, the first quarter ever in which they saw declining active users. And just earlier this week, BuzzFeed said they are continually seeing fewer people spending less time on Facebook. So really, they’ve got two major structural issues. It probably has more to do with that than spending more time together in Menlo Park, Jared.
