Mark Zuckerberg Boasts He Bled His Employees For AI Training Right Before Firing Them

I don’t know if you heard the news, but Mark Zuckerberg is a real piece of shit. One of many recent examples is the news from Futurism that the dead-eyed Meta CEO boasted to his employees that their intelligence and elite skills were unknowingly being used to train his AI model at the same time as they waited to learn if they’d be one of the 8,000 laid off from the company.

On April 23, Meta announced it would be firing 10 percent of its workforce. But not who, and not right away—no, in four weeks time. In what employees called “28 days of hell,” Zuckerberg—for some sadistic reason—announced the date on which one in ten Meta staff would learn they were unemployed, and it was a full month in advance. This let the entire staff sit in excruciating misery as the clock ticked down to May 20, none knowing if they had a job. The reason given was because “the news had already leaked,” and would not only affect almost 8,000 staff but also close down 6,000 open positions. And why? Because Meta’s ill-fated focus on AI is costing far more than it can afford.

That was cruel enough, but what we now know thanks to leaked audio from More Perfect Union is that on April 30, one week into this torture, barely functioning automaton Zuckerberg gave an all-hands meeting in which he boasted that Meta’s AI models were being trained on observing the same staff he was about to fire.

Called “employee device tracking,” the tech was already causing a fair amount of confusion and upset among staff, and the topic was raised at this meeting. Zuckerberg responded by explaining “what makes these AI models great.” After some inane rambling he says, “So we’re in a phase where basically the AI models learn from having real, from watching really smart people do things.” So presumably not him. He continued,

“And if you’re trying to get it to be able to to be able to do certain capabilities, having it be able to observe really smart people doing those things is, is very important.”

Such wit, such wisdom, such leadership.

I’ve transcribed the rest verbatim because I think any summarizing or paraphrasing doesn’t do justice to the hateful level of awful that comes next.

“So there are a few examples of where we’re trying to do this across the company because one, um, one basic insight and hypothesis that we have is that a lot of data generation across the field is done by these like contract companies… But, um, in general, the average intelligence of the people who are at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people that you can get to do tasks if you’re working through the contract, um, through these contractors. So if we’re trying to teach the models coding, for example, then having people internally, um, build tools that, or, or solve tasks that, um, help teach the model how to code, we think is going to [sic] dramatically increase our models’ coding ability faster than what others in the industry have the capability to do who don’t have thousands and thousands of extremely strong engineers at their company.”

This is just half of the reply, which then descends into far less coherent burbling about how the AI can learn “how smart people use computers.” It’s no less tone deaf or spiteful, however, as he so blandly explains how brilliant his staff are, and how vital their skills are for training his AI, moments before firing thousands of them.

LEAKED AUDIO: In an all-hands meeting on April 30, Mark Zuckerberg tells employees that he's training AI on them ahead of mass layoffs.

"The AI models learn from watching really smart people do things… The average intelligence of the people who are at this company is… pic.twitter.com/lt9eeJ3cwh

— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) May 19, 2026

Zuckerberg’s response shows no understanding at all that this is being spoken of in the direct context of the wave of mass firings that is still to come, to a staff among whom none knows if they are keeping their job, and in response to a question that began, “I know layoffs are top of mind,” before getting into the spying on employees that Zucks later admits he should probably have “better communicated” to staff.

To be told, “Yeah, no, we’re basically using you to train our evil robot that’s taking your jobs,” must have been beyond galling. As coders and engineers all around the world are having their jobs taken by AIs trained on their own work uploaded in good faith to sites like Github, to just openly announce you’re doing it but specifically targeting your own individual employees in the weeks before you fire them is utterly vile.

Meta pit

Come May 20 those sackings took place, and for a bonus as the NYT reports, a further 7,000 learned they were being reassigned to “new AI initiatives.”

Staff learned their fates in a time-zone ripple around the world, and U.S. staff were told to work from home for the rest of the week, presumably to prevent an all-out mutiny. That didn’t stop a few employees heading into the office to scavenge useful items like laptop chargers and snacks in case they were about to learn their keycards would no longer work. The NYT adds that office walls still featured flyers petitioning against the “employee device tracking.”

And worst of all, it’s all for folly. This is just the latest myopic preoccupation of Zuckerberg’s as he yet again pivots what was once called Facebook toward his latest, futile obsession. Once we were told that VR was the future of the company, and all funding went toward developing now-discontinued Oculus headsets. Next came the woefully embarrassing embracing of web 3.0, and the multi-billion money pit that was the Metaverse, an obviously doomed idea that Zuckerberg was so obsessed with that he renamed the company. Now it’s AI, the unwanted and un-useful predictive text engines that are wiping out the jobs Facebook was built on, all in Zuckerberg’s deranged vision of building a “superintelligence.” He intends to spend between $125 billion and 145 billion on this delusion, and when it doesn’t come to be it’ll be more Meta staff’s jobs that pay the price.

But presumably before they go, Zuckerberg will make sure to drain their blood for the giant cyborg he’s building that’ll protect the Earth from incoming alien invasions.