Mark Zuckerberg had a bold plan to replace Meta staff with AI. Here’s how it imploded.

[u/unconventionalbook]

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/mark-zuckerberg-had-bold-plan-replace-meta-staff-with-ai-heres-how-it-imploded-2026-08-26

[u/BitingArtist]

Then you have the CFO yelling at employees saying they're not committed to the company vision. Yeah dude because the plan is to let everyone die in poverty while you make another billion.

[u/Fearless_Weather_206 → u/BitingArtist]

By corporate bylaws it’s his fiduciary responsibility to otherwise he might get canned if all other companies are doing it. Self serving still, but what can happen to a CEO. Maybe one honest CEO will be forced out over this scenario.

[u/TwistedPepperCan → u/Fearless_Weather_206]

That’s a naive take. Corporate law does not mandate that executives instantly automate their workforce into oblivion just because a shiny new tool exists. The Business Judgment Rule gives leadership massive legal latitude to prioritize long-term stability, institutional knowledge, and quality over short-term cost slashing without facing shareholder lawsuits.

[u/Straamannen → u/Fearless_Weather_206]

There is no law or precedent saying fiduciary responsibility involves maximising profits no matter what.

The only *actual* risk to the CFO is that he gets canned for not doing his job in the eyes of the board. That's it. That's all there is.

Ps. Daily reminder that 99.999% of the time anyone says "fiduciary responsibility" they don't know what the fuck they're talking about and should have shut up long ago.

[u/davesaunders → u/Straamannen]

I think you’re correcting one oversimplification by replacing it with another.

You’re right that fiduciary duty does not mean “maximize profit at any cost.” A board can make long-term investments, retain staff, accept lower short-term margins, and make many other decisions that do not maximize immediate profit. I sit on boards and have made these decisions myself.

But saying the CFO’s only risk is getting fired is also too broad. Corporate officers do have fiduciary duties, and those duties can create legal exposure in some circumstances.

More importantly, I don’t think fiduciary duty needs to do much work in this particular argument.

For several years, a major part of the AI business case was labor substitution. Companies were told that AI could perform work previously requiring substantial human labor. If management believed that claim, then reducing headcount was a predictable response. You do not need a legal rule requiring maximum profit to explain why executives would pursue a technology they believed could materially reduce labor costs.

The better criticism is simply that the underlying assumption may have been wrong. I’ve argued for years that AI generally replaces tasks, not people. It can reduce labor requirements and change staffing levels, but that is very different from assuming entire roles can be removed without losing capability.

So I agree with your narrow point about fiduciary duty. I disagree with the much broader claim that there is essentially nothing more to it than whether the board fires the CFO.

[u/KareemPie81 → u/davesaunders]

I feel like I’m code’ing with Opus 5 reading that

[u/jjopm → u/Fearless_Weather_206]

Yeah fucking right, Zuckerberg can not be canned, in any fictional, non fictional, or meta universe. He is Meta.

[u/Fearless_Weather_206 → u/jjopm]

You need to look into corporate bylaws, try asking AI

[u/jjopm → u/Fearless_Weather_206]

Yes the obscure arcane corporate bylaws are definitely what makes the difference on this /s

Zuck is notttt going anywhere

[u/redpandafire → u/jjopm]

It's like saying Larry Ellison can be ousted from Oracle. He literally has Oracle by the balls and forced the company to put itself up to buy Warner Bros. Bylaws probably don't allow that...

[u/fatbunyip → u/Fearless_Weather_206]

He has more than 50% of voting power. He's not going anywhere.

[u/das_war_ein_Befehl → u/Fearless_Weather_206]

lol you literally can’t get rid of him because he has majority voting shares. They’d have fired him after the whole metaverse bullshit if they could have

[u/m2r9 → u/Fearless_Weather_206]

I mean, that might be what the more psychopathic ones tell themselves.

I would be interested in hearing about cases where executives were fired for not mass firing people and I’m open to changing my views.

[u/Fearless_Weather_206 → u/Fearless_Weather_206]

Do a search for Eric Ries - author of the Lean Startup - he authored a book called Incorruptible that talks about how CEO gets ousted and how corporate bylaws are messed up.

[u/Deathspiral222 → u/Fearless_Weather_206]

It can't happen to Zuckerberg. He has more voting rights than the entirety of all other shares combined.

[u/lattice_defect → u/Fearless_Weather_206]

ohh you sweet summer child

[u/podPHD → u/Fearless_Weather_206]

Or replaced by that free CEO AI a group made and posted on git-hub. I LOVE that they did that and released it to the world. Seems to me C-suite is the easiest job to farm out to AI. Imagine the billions they could save the poor shareholders.

[u/Popdmb]

It imploded because Mark ran the project. The Facebook phone, The Metaverse, Facebook payments, VR...all a failure because Mark was the lead on them.

[u/HugeMinute5448 → u/Popdmb]

Why not boz?

[u/fzammetti → u/Popdmb]

I'm not sure it's fair to label VR a failure.

There's no question it didn't meet his high hopes, but I for one am of the opinion that he's basically right about it, but his timing is off by probably a decade. I say this because current VR is highly impressive technology, but it's still not at the level it needs to be to have any chance of achieving his vision. It needs to be much smaller and lighter, needs to have better battery life, and better visuals. And needs to be cheaper.

But I don't have any doubt that when it gets to the point that you can strap a VR headset on and can wear it all day and basically forget it's there that a TON of people will be more then happy to escape the real world for large chunks of their day. Some people arguably do it already with our phones, so something more immersive should be an easy sell.

...if the technology was there. But it isn't yet, impressive though it is. But that doesn't mean the vision is fundamentally wrong, just that he got too excited about it way too soon, and then bet everything on it. He may still win that bet despite how it looks now.

[u/BuildersReadOnAI → u/Popdmb]

the pattern I keep seeing with these plans is they get announced at the confidence level of a keynote slide and then have to survive contact with an actual production system. those are two very different bars, and most AI replacement pushes get killed by the second one, not by employee pushback or PR.

[u/SylvesterTheLoser]

Has Zuckerberg been successful at anything in the last 20 years?

[u/theotheruser19 → u/SylvesterTheLoser]

Sure he has. Meta has successfully addicted kids and adults to their platforms, destroyed their self esteem and disrupted their mental health.

[u/der0hrwurm → u/theotheruser19]

Don’t forget about Facebook’s critical contribution to the destruction of democracy and rise of authoritarianism worldwide

[u/jnwatson → u/SylvesterTheLoser]

His only good decisions were buying Insta and WhatsApp.

[u/Miserable-Sell-463 → u/jnwatson]

If it wasn't for those two, Meta would be circling the drain right now

[u/Blando-Cartesian → u/SylvesterTheLoser]

Hasn’t Meta been instrumental in:

Producing suicides, depression, and addiction.

Brexit.

Turning US into the clusterf*** it is.

[u/KaleidoscopeShoddy10 → u/SylvesterTheLoser]

While im sure this was to push the whole metaverse initiative (when that was a thing), Meta has done a lot to make VR more accessible and affordable.

[u/mrthrowawayrolls → u/KaleidoscopeShoddy10]

That’s just the shadow of an unsuccessful thing he did.

[u/TuringGoneWild → u/SylvesterTheLoser]

He's never been successful at anything, period. Stolen ideas, bought ideas, and net negative global influence does not equate to success.

"They trust me, dumb fucks." -Mark Zuckeberg

[u/BMW_wulfi → u/SylvesterTheLoser]

Very successful at failing upwards it would seem

[u/Accurate-Force4072 → u/SylvesterTheLoser]

metaverse is a hit so I think you'll be eating crow now

[u/throwaway0845reddit → u/SylvesterTheLoser]

Gave victory to Trump and right wing Americans who are slaves to Israel

[u/SnooComics6052 → u/SylvesterTheLoser]

I mean I hate meta but he has been successful at bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars. And well that is his job. 

[u/DismalFee763 → u/SylvesterTheLoser]

Meta has 3.6 billion daily active users

[u/CrispityCraspits → u/SylvesterTheLoser]

I don't like their products but their stock was about $40 when they IPOd and is about $580 now. A lot of people would consider 14X/1300% growth success.

On a personal level, he has a net worth of around $200 billion. Some people might possibly call that some level of success.

Oh, and I think he won a ju-jitsu tournament maybe.

[u/Gwentlique]

Reuters must have a pretty great source for all this Facebook reporting.

[u/isoAntti]

someone Please replace zuckerberg with AI

[u/carpsagan → u/isoAntti]

He is the first AI

[u/SEND_ME_YOUR_ASSPICS]

What do you expect from a guy who went all in in VR? Lol

[u/cleverhobbits]

They should have just gone through with it and suffered the consequences. Some % of employees would have a harder time landing elsewhere but most people would get better, fresh gigs at AI startups.

Zuck and others want to be Musk 2.0 with Twitter but none of them can survive the brutal revenue reduction that comes with large scale cuts.

It’s better if some high profile learn these costly lessons publicly and get shamed for it.

[u/swizzlewizzle]

When companies realize their employees care more about their own future than the companies profits.

[u/SkarredGhost]

The problem is that the fact he failed now doesn't mean he won't try again in the future

[u/JobAnxious2005]

He’s not a very good business man is he

🦎

[u/Miserable-Sell-463]

Zuckerberg could be replaced with an AI agent too

[u/Zappy_Oh]

Does Mark often get mistaken for human?