Happy Thursday! I can’t believe it has been almost two months since I sent the first edition of this newsletter. If you’re interested, you can view the last four weeks of editions here, here, here, and here. We’re planning to make an archive that’s easier to navigate.

I was interviewed for the most recent episode of Vox’s Today, Explained podcast about the growing calls to ban TikTok. We talked about my visit to TikTok’s transparency center earlier this month and how the company is attempting to assuage the concerns of regulators. Considering that the EU just joined the US Congress in banning the app from government devices, it’s looking like TikTok will need to step up its game.

Next week, I’ll be at the annual Upfront Summit here in Los Angeles, which is one of my favorite conferences every year. I mean, where else can you see interviews with Al Gore, The Chainsmokers, and Tom Morello? This year’s speakers also include Vanessa Pappas, Alexis Ohanian, Vinod Khosla, Scott Belsky, and David Marcus. If you’ll be at Upfront too please reach out so we can meet up.

In this edition of Command Line: what I’m hearing about Meta’s coming layoffs, Amazon’s surprise mandate to return to the office, the latest inside Twitter, and more. 

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Meta is planning another round of layoffs, I can unfortunately confirm. Leadership has been coy both internally and externally about what is coming, but I’m told that the current plan is to announce more cuts in March after last year’s performance bonuses are paid out. Given what I’ve heard about plans to cut certain orgs by double-digit percentages, I wouldn’t be surprised if the total number is somewhere in the ballpark of the last layoff, which was about 11,000 people or 13 percent of the company.

If you’ve been paying attention, this shouldn’t be a surprise. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called this the “year of efficiency” and said he wants to flatten the org chart. Managers have been consumed by budget exercises and offsites in recent weeks. At the same time, some mid-level talent is being primed for promotions that suggest more senior departures are coming.

For this annual performance review, or “PSC” as it’s called inside Meta, managers were pushed to designate 10 percent of their reports — the higher end of the normal target range — with the company’s second-lowest rating of “meets most.” If you get that rating, something is very wrong and you are usually on your way to getting PIPed out of the building. After a report from The Wall Street Journal about the low ratings push, there was speculation that they will be used to build the layoff list this time. But after the story, Meta’s communications department refuted the idea with an internal post I saw that said “we are not using PSC as a means for another layoff.”

A sense of newfound austerity has been creeping into nearly every part of Meta as the next round of job cuts gets closer. The company multiplier on bonuses this cycle is the lowest it has been since 2012. Even the sprawling Reality Labs division, which the venerable tech analyst Michael Nathanson recently called “a money pit of a magnitude rivaling any in American corporate history,” is canceling projects.

I’ve heard of at least two early-stage hardware prototypes, one codenamed Cardiff and the other Hermosa, that have been canned recently. Meanwhile, leaders for Reality Labs are scheduled to gather at Meta’s Menlo Park HQ next week for a first-of-its-kind, multiday summit of road map and vision-setting presentations, including one meeting that is titled “Must Go Faster.”

In the midst of its Great Flattening, Meta just announced one of its more interesting product updates in years. Facebook and Instagram users will soon be able to pay a monthly subscription to be verified with a government ID, granting them a checkmark and direct access to customer support, along with boosted visibility in areas like the main Facebook feed and Instagram’s Reels tab.

After a help center page for Meta Verified leaked ahead of schedule, Zuckerberg announced the subscription offering over the weekend. On Tuesday, analysts for Bank of America called it a "potential high margin business” and estimated that about 12 million accounts could become paid users in a year, resulting in an additional $1.7 billion in yearly revenue.

Back in August, I broke the news that Meta had formed a new product group to explore paid features across its apps. This verified subscription is the first thing to ship from that group. Meta’s VP of monetization overseeing it, John Hegeman, told me when it was formed that there is no plan to let people turn off ads in exchange for paying. So don’t get your hopes up.

The incredibly strong reaction to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s return-to-office mandate will likely repeat across the tech industry this year as more employers realize they have the leverage to make people come back into the office. (What I hope isn’t replicated, however, is an Amazon VP using ChatGPT to write “a story about important and organic learnings in the work place” to try and calm down their team. Super cringe!)

Jassy’s surprise announcement last Friday, which said that employees will need to be in the office at least three days a week starting May 1st, caught even heads of company divisions by surprise. Now thousands of employees are protesting the decision in a Slack channel called "Remote Advocacy.”

It will be interesting to see how this policy is enforced and how quickly more of Amazon’s peers institute similar mandates. In the meantime, if you work at Amazon and have thoughts about all this, I’m all ears…

If Elon Musk told you to redo something as foundational as Twitter’s ad targeting in a week, would you even try? Earlier this week, I reported on the ultimatum Twitter engineers were recently given to make Twitter’s ad system keyword-driven like Google’s — a task that current and former employees tell me is impossible to achieve in that timeframe. Then there’s the fact that no social media business has successfully based its ad targeting on keywords like Google search ads. 

It turns out that Twitter’s greatest business folly has been Musk himself. “The single biggest mistake he made was to break trust with advertisers,” a former senior Twitter exec told me when I asked about Musk’s latest antics. “There’s a straight line between his actions and the decline in the quality/relevance of ads on the platform and the massive decline in revenue, which is driving ongoing cost cutting.”

As its ads business continues to deteriorate, Musk has started jacking up the monthly cost of its enterprise API plan. One message from a customer forwarded to me says the cost was increased by more than 3x without warning.

Meanwhile, morale inside Twitter is as low as ever. I’m told employees have been seen interviewing for other jobs openly in the office. Musk is expected to unveil a new stock compensation structure by the end of March, though there is little faith that will actually happen on time. Until then, everyone is working for less money and with fewer resources. The company’s Slack has been down for multiple days with no explanation, leading many to believe the bill is no longer being paid. And Twitter’s internal directory has also been offline since Musk took over, making it nearly impossible to know who reports to who.

“I’ll be leaving when the right opportunity comes my way,” one current employee recently told me. “It’s unfortunate. I love the platform and truly believe it can be a differentiator...But it’s all but destroyed now.”

“We’re a court. We really don’t know about these things. These are not the nine greatest experts on the internet.” - Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan during early oral arguments for Gonzalez v. Google, a case that could finally upend Section 230.

For more on that and another related cause involving Twitter, check out the coverage by my colleagues on The Verge.

That’s all for now! If you liked what you read, please don’t hesitate to forward this email to a friend.

I’ll be back next Thursday with another edition. In the meantime, if you have any feedback or tips, respond directly to this email, and I’ll get back to you, or you can reach me at +1 502-572-8619 on just about any messaging app. I want to hear what you're liking and what you'd like to see less of.

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