What the hell are they even spending all this money on when they don’t have much to show for it?
Well, about half of that is probably salary. There are apparently 17,000 Reality Labs employees. If you assume the average salary is 100K or more, which is reasonable for tech jobs in high COL areas, you’re already looking at a couple billion after benefits that the company has to spend on headcount. The other spend is probably third-party contracts, hardware, etc.
17,000 employees is ridiculous in itself. It’s at least an order of magnitude too high.
Total compensation (salary + stock) for software developers at big tech companies in the USA starts around $200k and goes up from there. With 5+ years experience, it’s not uncommon to have $500k+ total comp. You can check https://levels.fyi/ for data. E3 is the starting level at Meta, and 5 years experience would be around E5 or E6.
Plus you need to include all the other benefits like 401k (retirement fund), health insurance, etc.
I don’t know if that headcount I listed includes contract employees. They typically get compensated far less, and anecdotally I’ve been told by a former Meta friend that there are more contracted developers than salaried there. And what’s the ratio of software developers compared to other personnel? HR, QA, marketing, sales, etc? Employees in other countries? I figured a more conservative estimate was reasonable for cost overall.
the headline says that Meta lost 4.5 billion in the 2nd quarter. Also the article says they meta lost 3.9 billion in the first quarter. I think that is an a 8billion dollar loss in 6months.
Unless I’m mistaken on the accounting, You shouldnt count a full years salary when comparing it to a 3 month loss, because meta has only paid 3 months compensation during the 2nd quarter.
Using your numbers
( 17,000 x $100,000 )/4 is $425mill. In salary paid out in the quarter. Although software and hardware engineers at meta make way more than 100k/year.
Oh that title is beautiful.
Facebook spends billions on a fake walled garden “metaverse”, and has nothing to show for it.
Meanwhile, Frooxius and his team developed Resonite (and its predecessor Neos), and both of them are far closer to being actual metaverse implementations, simply due to them being able to speak HTTP/Websocket/OSC to external user applications.Number go up until number go down.
It’s just investment bankers conning investment bankers out of other people’s money.
Its ok though - just make sure none of these people are playing with your pension or savings.
And I assume all the shareholders were fine with this?
For context, Meta reported 40 billion in revenue during that period, with 24Bn in expenses and made 13bn for the period. All those numbers are up from the same period last year.
So I’m gonna go with “probably, yeah”.
i mean, the main concern for most shareholders is the stock price, and meta stock price in the last 6 months has gone up 20% and 47% on the last year, im pretty sure most of them are happy as long as the bubble keeps going up
I mean, that’s kinda circular isn’t it? Them being happy, being why the stock goes up.
Thats debatable, he asked if shareholders were happy with meta burning billions, if the shareholders werent happy they would be looking for an out and making the stock price go down, them being fine with it makes it so buying stock becomes more expensive as people is holding and the value goes up.
Meta’s AI division is under Reality Labs. A lot of this money is buying GPUs and training models: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Labs
Yep, and Llama 3.1 just came out, which is the most open state-of-the-art LLM out right now.
Just how? What are they all doing there? According to the wiki Reality Labs have 17,000 employees. They didn’t create anything that a company of 1,000 couldn’t.
Yeah, something doesn’t add up. Even if all 17000 employees were paid $400k/year (I’d be shocked if this were the case) that would be ~1/3 this amount. I smell BS.
Another tax evasion scheme?
When the math doesn’t add up… I figure there’s money launderers in play.
But I won’t look for them too hard, as I have only risk and no reward from being the one to find them.
It’s a typical silicon valley situation. Half of those people are likely doing next to no work, and the management doesn’t even know who they are
Nonsense, management has setup meetings throughout the day so that the people that are actually working only get about an hour’s worth of actual work done
You love to see it. Fuck the Zuck.
