Altimeter Capital Chairman and CEO Brad Gerstner said in an open letter to Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday that the company has too many employees and is moving too slowly to maintain investor confidence.
Meta's investor recommends a plan to get the company's mojo back. The plan includes reducing staff costs by 20% and limiting the company's expensive investments in technology "metaverse” to no more than $5 billion per year.
"Meta must rebuild trust with investors, employees and the technology community in order to attract, inspire and retain the best people in the world," Gerstner wrote in the letter.
"In short, Meta should be fit and focused." The letter is the latest indication that Meta investors are beginning to express reservations about the company's recent performance. Meta stock is down more than 61% in 2022 so far.
At the end of the second quarter of this year, Altimeter Capital owned over 2 million shares of Meta. It's also a vote of less confidence in the company's ambitions in the world of virtual and augmented reality.
Meta changed that name of her company from Facebook to focus more on VR hardware and software. Nevertheless spent $10+5 billion this year for new technology.
On October 11, Meta announced a new high-end VR headset, the Quest Pro. However, there is little evidence that virtual reality or some of Meta's metaverse applications, such as the Horizon Worlds, attract audiences.
"Furthermore, people are confused about what the metaverse means," Gerstner wrote. “If the company was investing $1-2 billion a year in this project, then this confusion might not even be a problem. The estimated $100 billion investment in an unknown future is extremely large and scary, even by Silicon Valley standards.”
