Mark Zuckerberg is apparently worried about his own safety. The CEO of Meta has at least had the expenses for his own personal protection increased at the company’s expense. In view of the fact that the CEO has only recently initiated a gigantic wave of layoffs, this seems quite surprising.
Protection of Mark Zuckerberg will henceforth cost $14 million
For the CEOs of tech giants, the economic situation is not even that easy at the moment. After the boom seemed unstoppable in recent years, many companies are currently experiencing at least stagnation, if not a drop in sales and profits. So it’s no surprise that many heads are currently rolling in the once-celebrated young companies of California’s fabled Silicon Valley. Twitter is by no means the only company affected by mass layoffs. After Elon Musk moved into the company’s executive suite, the short messaging service’s workforce was hit by a real wave of layoffs. Meta also had to react to the disappointing revenue and profit figures, which resulted in particular from the drop in demand from advertising customers.
This in turn is linked to the ailing global economic situation. After all, the advertising budget is the first area where companies are making cuts. But even if Meta wants to save money on its own workforce, the tech company is definitely happy to spend in other areas. This applies in particular to the personal protection of company CEO Mark Zuckerberg. While Meta has so far only spent $10 million on the protection of its CEO, it is now set to increase this figure to $14 million. This has an unpleasant aftertaste when you consider that Zuckerberg according to Forbes himself has a fortune of around 67.6 billion US dollars.
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Symbolic annual salary of $1
Mark Zuckerberg is only on paper with his annual salary of 1 US dollar an extremely favorable CEO. After all, the corporate CEO incurs a lot of costs away from it. In 2019 alone, flights and personal protection of the tech billionaire are said to have swallowed up more than 23 million US dollars of the group’s assets. But the group does not want to save on the boss, but on the workforce. For the most part, they did not fare well in a performance review. There is even talk of below-average ratings for several thousand employees.
Apparently, there is a threat of further redundancies, which Zuckerberg confirms by saying that there are “a lot of people” at Meta “who shouldn’t be here”. Meta itself states that it is hoping for voluntary layoffs. If this is not the case, the next wave of layoffs is likely to roll in. Considering that Meta has already kicked out nearly 11,000 employees in recent months, this seems truly frightening. With so many disgruntled laid-off employees, extensive personal protection is certainly not a bad idea. After all, you don’t make friends with this approach.
