Is Mark Zuckerberg standing down as Meta CEO?


Meta has denied a report that said Mark Zuckerberg is standing down as its chief executive. On Tuesday, a report said that Mark Zuckerberg would be stepping down from his role as the head of the company next year. It was first reported in The Leak.

But Andy Stone, Meta’s outspoken communications official, denied the report on Twitter. “This is false,” he tweeted, giving no more clarification or context.

Mark Zuckerberg has faced widespread criticism in recent weeks after Meta fired large numbers of its staff. Earlier this month, Meta said that it would be losing 13% of its employees, with more than 11,000 people being fired.

Mark Zuckerberg then said that he took “accountability for these decisions and how we got here”, in a message shared with employees. He added that he had mistakenly assumed that the growth the company saw during the pandemic was likely to continue but that in recent months it has slowed.

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Mark Zuckerberg has been continuing the company’s investment into the metaverse, despite questions over whether Meta’s work on virtual reality would pay off. The company’s latest results, released at the end of October, showed that Meta’s “Reality Labs” division lost almost $10 billion this year so far, also indicating that those losses were likely to “grow significantly” in 2023.

“Look, I get that a lot of people might disagree with this investment, but from what I can tell, I think this is going to be a very important thing,” Mark Zuckerberg said during his call with investors.

“People will look back a decade from now and talk about the importance of the work being done here,” he added.