Brad Gerstner, the chairman and CEO of Altimeter Capital and a shareholder in Meta Platforms Inc., addressed an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and CEO of Facebook, on Monday, urging him to become healthy and focused and advocating a reduction in manpower and investments in the metaverse.
“Meta has drifted into the land of excess — too many people, too many ideas, too little urgency. This lack of focus and fitness is obscured when growth is easy but deadly when growth slows and technology changes,” Gerstner wrote in his letter.
In his letter, the Altimeter chair recommended that Meta lower its staffing costs by 20% and its investments in the metaverse and virtual reality (VR) to no more than US$5 billion annually.
Additionally, Gerstner advised Meta to cut its yearly capital expenditures, or the long-term investments a business makes to upgrade fixed or non-consumable assets, by at least $5 billion.
Altimeter Capital owned more than 2.4 million shares of Meta by the end of the second quarter of 2022, despite the stock’s 60% annual decline.
Recent Meta internal documents showed that its flagship metaverse platform, Horizon Worlds, is underperforming in terms of user attraction – in comparison to its earlier aim of amassing 500,000 monthly active users (MAU), its current MAU lingers below 200,000, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Last year, Meta, previously Facebook, changed its name to emphasize advancements in the metaverse.
