Meta approves bonuses of up to 200% for company execs as it lays off workers
Facebook parent company Meta recently announced that it approved bonuses of up to 200% for the company's executives.
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) dated Feb. 13, Meta said that its Compensation, Nominating and Governance Committee (CNGC) approved an increase in the target bonus percentage for named executives other than CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The change increases bonuses from 75% of the named executive officer's base salary to 200% of their salary, and would start taking effect with the company's 2025 annual performance period.
Sign with logo in front of the headquarters of Meta at 1 Hacker Way in the Silicon Valley, Menlo Park, California, July 11, 2024. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
"In approving this increase, the CNGC considered that the target total cash compensation for the named executive officers (other than the CEO) was at or below the 15th percentile of the target total cash compensation of executives holding similar positions at the peer group of companies that the Company benchmarks against for executive compensation purposes," Meta said.
With the change, the total cash compensation for the non-CEO executives at Meta "falls at approximately the 50th percentile of the Peer Group Target Cash Compensation."
The higher bonuses come after Meta signaled in mid-January that it would cut 5% of its workforce based on performance. Zuckerberg said in a memo, "I've decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster."
"We typically manage out people who aren't meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we're going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during the year," he said.
Meta said that it is planning to reach 10% of "non-regrettable" attrition before the end of its current performance cycle. That figure includes about 5% non-regrettable attrition from 2024, according to the memo.
Meta, which is also the parent company of Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus in addition to Facebook, has seen its stock rise by about 14.8% since the start of the year.
Last month, Zuckerberg said the company is planning to invest up to $65 billion in the company's artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives.
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He wrote in a post on Facebook that 2025 "will be a defining year for AI," and said he expects the company's "Meta AI will be the leading assistant serving more than 1 billion people, Llama 4 will become the leading state of the art model, and we'll build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to our R&D efforts."
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