Meta dismissed over two dozen employees from its Los Angeles office for misusing company meal credits to purchase items such as laundry detergent, wine glasses, and acne treatment pads, according to a company source.

Many of the social media giant’s corporate buildings have elaborate dining services that give meals to staff as a reward. Meta’s two-year-old workplace near New York City’s Penn Station, for example, has an expensive food court-style cafeteria with multiple booths that are all free for employees.

However, for employees in smaller locations without food services, the company provides meal coupons — $20 for breakfast and $25 for lunch and dinner — so they can have food delivered to the office while on the job.

Meta Fires Employees For Spending Food Allowances On Personal Items Like Acne Pads And Wine Glasses

The meal vouchers are intended for employees to eat while working at the office, which can involve lengthy hours spread throughout multiple meals of the day, as is common in the computer industry.

According to the source, an internal inquiry discovered that several Los Angeles-based employees utilized meal monies to purchase items other than food or to have meals delivered to their homes.

Meta’s median total yearly salary for individual employees (excluding CEO Mark Zuckerberg) is $379,050, according to a regulatory filing released earlier this year.

The firings, which occurred last week, were originally reported by the Financial Times.

The firings came after Meta said on Thursday that it was laying off employees across the company as part of a number of unrelated restructurings.

“Today, a few teams at Meta are making changes to ensure resources are aligned with their long-term strategic goals and location strategy,” Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton stated. “This includes relocating certain teams and assigning some individuals to alternative positions. When a role is terminated, we work diligently to locate other opportunities for impacted personnel.”

Meta declined to say how many staff were laid off.

Meta Fires Employees For Spending Food Allowances On Personal Items Like Acne Pads And Wine Glasses

The cuts affected Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Reality Labs, which houses Meta’s virtual reality and metaverse initiatives.

Jane Manchun Wong, a well-known security researcher who predicted new social media features such as a Facebook resume feature and a tool on the platform formerly known as Twitter that allowed users to hide replies to their tweets, was among those laid off before being hired by Meta in June 2023 to work on the Instagram and Threads teams.

Last year, Meta laid off around 20,000 employees in successive rounds of cuts in an effort to reverse a year of revenue declines and stagnant user growth, which Zuckerberg dubbed the company’s “year of efficiency.” The company’s shares (META) have up roughly 80% since this time last year.

SOURCE | CNN

Netflix said on Thursday that its membership growth slowed substantially over the summer, indicating that the massive benefits from the video-streaming service’s crackdown on freeloading consumers are cooling off.

Netflix added 5.1 million customers over the July-September period, a 42% decrease from the same period previous year. Nonetheless, the company’s revenue and earnings increased faster than analysts expected, according to FactSet Research.

Netflix had 282.7 million global customers as of September 30, far surpassing any other streaming provider.

The Los Gatos, California, corporation earned $2.36 billion, or $5.40 per share, a 41% increase over the same period last year. Revenue increased 15% from a year ago to $9.82 billion. Netflix management estimated that revenue would climb at the same 15% year-over-year rate during the October-December period, which was somewhat better than analysts had anticipated.

Netflix’s Subscriber Growth Is Slowing, But Its Profit And Stock Price Are Still Surging

The robust financial performance in the previous quarter, combined with the bullish prognosis, overshadowed any concerns about slowing subscriber growth. Netflix’s stock price increased by about 4% in extended trading following the release of the statistics, adding to the company’s more than 40% gain this year.

“We had a plan to reaccelerate growth, and we delivered on that plan,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said during a video call to discuss the findings.

Subscriber increases in the previous quarter were the lowest recorded in any three-month period since the beginning of last year. That drop-off shows Netflix is entering a new phase after benefiting from a prohibition on the once-common practice of sharing account passwords, which allowed an estimated 100 million users to watch its popular service for free.

The crackdown, prompted by a rare loss of subscribers following the pandemic in 2022, helped Netflix add 57 million subscribers from June 2022 to this June — an average of more than 7 million per quarter — while many of its industry rivals struggled as households cut back on discretionary spending.

“That’s why accelerating growth via advertising becomes paramount to Netflix’s go-forward strategy,” Proulx told the crowd.

Netflix’s Subscriber Growth Is Slowing, But Its Profit And Stock Price Are Still Surging

As part of its evolution, Netflix has been increasingly supplementing its lineup of scripted TV shows and movies with live programming, such as a Labor Day spectacle featuring renowned glutton Joey Chestnut setting a world record for eating hot dogs in a showdown with his longtime rival Takeru Kobayashi.

Netflix will try to draw more viewers this quarter with a fight on Nov. 15 between former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson and Jake Paul, a YouTube celebrity turned boxer, as well as two National Football League games on Christmas Day.

SOURCE | AP

(VOR News) – Chip stocks in the TSMC United States were already higher than they had been historically before trading started on Thursday.

Based in North Asia, the technical powerhouse TSMC made a prediction and a declaration of good sales, which generated investor expectations and finally resulted in this acquisition. Both of these comments clearly had a direct bearing on this surge.

The biggest contract chipmaker in the world, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., has raised its annual revenue growth projection and said that sales of artificial intelligence chips will account for a mid-teen percentage of the company’s whole revenue for the whole year.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. supplies this material. < From the outset, this information came from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. TSMC provided this material at the start of the procedure.

Regarding the demand for CPUs used to run artificial intelligence applications, a reasonable projection was developed. It was so since this was the reason this happened.

Thus, the projection presented by the most important producer of advanced artificial intelligence chips TSMC strengthened the faith that investors have in the future possibilities of chipmakers. This was the state of affairs that resulted from the projection’s making.

The market values of chipmakers have skyrocketed over the past two years directly as a result of Big Tech’s chip expenditure increasing. The direct reason behind chipmakers’ market value increase is this one. The last two years have seen this increase take place.

The continuation of pre-market developments is expected to lead to a market value of TSMC higher than one trillion dollars. The value of the company’s traded on the United States stock exchange shares rose by seven percent. This benefit was evident.

Share prices of both NVIDIA, a TSMC customer and industry leader in artificial intelligence chip technology, and AMD, a smaller rival, rose by more than two percent. The leading company in computer chip technology is NVIDIA.

In the field of artificial intelligence chip technology, NVIDIA rules the market most of all. Memory chip distributor Micron, Broadcom, a maker of networking chips, and semiconductor producer Qualcomm for smartphones all reported increases ranging from 1.5% to 3%.

Leading the way in the networking chip space is Broadcom.

The manufacturer of TSMC networking chips in the domain is Broadcom.

Broadcom is a semiconductor manufacturer for use in wireless networking. Another sign that things were headed in the right direction was the chipmaker Intel’s steady increasing tendency, which was showing through a lot of problems. Intel wants to challenge TSMC in the field of advanced contract manufacturing by building more chip factories.

The company’s whole plan calls for it. Maintaining a competitive edge over its competitors is Intel’s core aim, hence this particular strategy is part of that whole one. Analysts hold that this project will last for a good length of time before it is eventually completed.

Following ASML, a major player in the chipmaking equipment market, Tuesday’s predictions were drastically lowered, so TSMC’s projection gave some relief to investors. In this sense, TSMC’s prognosis was quite beneficial. This led to investors fearing a resurgence in demand for chips not used in the manufacturing of artificial intelligence slower than expected.

Investors saw great relief in the TSMC prediction. On Wednesday, the day TSMC made their recommendations available, they made them available to the whole public.

The pick-and-shovel trade that is now under way on Wall Street is driving billions of dollars into companies in the semiconductor sector by investors.

This has caused the shares of TSMC listed in the United States to skyrocket by more than 80% so far this year, while the shares of NVIDIA have climbed by more than twice their previous value. These two rises have happened starting at the beginning of the year

SOURCE: AFN

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