The hottest new real estate marketing tactic: accepting IPO stock

Some luxury home sellers — including the Miami and Tribeca properties above — have started saying they'll accept tech stocks in place of traditional financing.

Maria Corina Martinez; Francisco Rosario | DD-Reps

• In a slow market, luxury home sellers have started saying they'll accept tech stocks as payment.
• Advertising stock options in listings allows real estate marketers to subtly target wealthy buyers.
• Although the strategy is making headlines, it's not clear if it has translated into completed sales.

Luxury-home sellers are finding a new way to stand out in a sluggish market: telling buyers they'll accept startup stock.

Listings from Brooklyn to the Bay Area have begun advertising that sellers are willing to consider accepting shares in companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX in exchange for multimillion-dollar properties.

While few expect many homes to ultimately trade hands this way, some real estate marketers say the strategy can be an effective way to capture the attention of newly wealthy tech workers and investors sitting on hard-to-access private-company equity.

Andrew Rohm, founder of the luxury real estate marketing firm DMR Media, said the tactic works "100%" as a marketing strategy, adding that, while stock-for-home transactions aren't unheard of, they're uncommon.

Most buyers with significant stock holdings simply use those assets as collateral for loans rather than trading the shares outright, he said. However, as a marketing tool, IPO stock may be a different story.

Rohm said real estate marketers have long tried to position homes in front of buyers as they approach major liquidity events. In the AI boom, that means employees at companies like Anthropic and OpenAI who could eventually see windfalls from public offerings.

Housing advertisers face restrictions on targeting buyers by profession or demographics, Rohm said. By explicitly mentioning pre-IPO stock in listing descriptions and advertisements, sellers can create marketing that resonates with a specific audience without running afoul of the rules.

"You just have to call someone out through the advertising," Rohm said, adding that modern algorithms tend to identify and amplify those messages to prospective buyers.

The trend is emerging as luxury homes are taking longer to sell. High home prices and elevated mortgage rates have sidelined many buyers, while homeowners with low-rate mortgages have been reluctant to sell. For luxury properties, which already appeal to a limited audience because the pool of potential buyers is relatively small, standing out has become increasingly important.

"Houses are sitting on the market extremely long right now," Rohm said.

By explicitly mentioning stock deals in listing advertisements, luxury sellers can market toward a specific audience without running afoul of restrictions on targeting buyers based on profession.

Barak Blackburn Team

The investment appeal of a tech stock deal

One example is a Tribeca apartment owned by Sebastian Sagar, a finance professional and investor. The property has been on the market for about a year and has taken a $1.5 million price cut after being originally listed at $7.8 million.

Sagar said the idea came to him after he learned Anthropic had leased office space a few blocks from his apartment.

He said he had been reviewing his portfolio and realized he wanted less exposure to real estate and more to AI. At the same time, he imagined Anthropic employees sitting on valuable private-company equity that they couldn't easily sell or borrow against.

Sagar described the arrangement as a potential "win-win" that would allow him to gain early access to a company he believes has significant long-term upside while helping a buyer acquire a home near work.

In Miami, Luis Noguera said his family is open to accepting shares in Anthropic, OpenAI, or SpaceX for a $2.6 million home owned by his father.

Noguera, who previously worked in tech, said his family recently established a family office and views AI companies as potentially attractive long-term investments.

Luxury properties typically sit on the market for six months or more. In the current market, some homes — like the Tribeca apartment above — haven't sold in more than a year, despite aggressive price cuts.

Francisco Rosario | DD-Reps

The house, which was previously a rental, doesn't really play a strategic long-term role for the family, Noguera said. Owning stock in one of the companies instead, he said, feels like a better investment.

In Brooklyn, the owner of a townhouse at 3 Wythe Lane told Business Insider that mentioning Anthropic shares in the listing was less about a specific company than a broader acknowledgment of where wealth is being created.

"Every generation has its wealth-creation vehicle," the anonymous seller said in an emailed statement, sent through their listing agent. "For many people today, that's private technology companies and digital assets."

The seller said the reference to Anthropic was intended to signal openness to "creative transaction structures" and to appeal to buyers who may be approaching a major liquidity event.

Some of the sellers experimenting with the idea acknowledge that any eventual deal would likely involve a mix of cash and stock rather than an all-equity transaction.

Whether any homes ultimately trade hands for startup shares remains to be seen, but for sellers struggling to attract attention in a difficult luxury market, that may not be the point: The listings generate headlines, spark conversations, and put properties in front of a highly specific group of potential buyers.

In a market where multimillion-dollar homes can sit for months, simply getting noticed may be more valuable.

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A relationship banker and a risk manager: Meet the two candidates vying to succeed JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon

Doug Petno and Troy Rohrbaugh are the two frontrunners in the race to succeed Jamie Dimon.

JPMorgan

• JPMorgan named Troy Rohrbaugh and Doug Petno co-presidents, making them the frontrunners in the CEO race.
• Though they co-led the investment bank, Rohrbaugh and Petno have distinct strengths.
• Here's a guide to the two top contenders, one a great risk manager, the other a client confidant.

And then there were two.

JPMorgan elevated Troy Rohrbaugh and Doug Petno to co-presidents on Thursday, the clearest sign yet that they are leading the race to replace CEO Jamie Dimon.

The announcement comes after more than a decade of speculation and a rotating cast of succession candidates. Even now, the field could keep shifting until the day Dimon steps down. While both are held in high esteem at JPMorgan, Petno and Rohrbaugh have distinct strengths — the former is known for his charm and client relationships, the latter for his trading chops and quieter risk management.

Petno and Rohrbaugh had jointly led the commercial and investment bank, which Petno will now lead on his own as Rohrbaugh becomes CEO of the firm's consumer and community banking unit. Marianne Lake, the current head of consumer and community banking who had been seen as a frontrunner in the CEO race, is retiring.

Though the announcement effectively narrows what had been a more crowded field to a two-person race, it doesn't seem that Dimon, 70, plans to step down anytime soon. Analysts from Bank of America said the announcement, especially Lake's retirement, suggests Dimon will stick around for several more years, and his timeline could impact whether Petno, 61, or Rohrbaugh, 56, lands his job.

"It's a question of timing more than anything," Mike Mayo, a Wells Fargo banking analyst, said. Mayo said that Rohrbaugh, with his relative youth, likely has a better shot at becoming CEO the longer Dimon stays in the position.

Their decadeslong careers at the bank

Petno has worked at JPMorgan for more than 35 years, though originally thought he would be a veterinarian, he told his alma mater, Wabash College, in 2019. He started at the firm as an investment banker and eventually became head of the natural resources group.

He became the CEO of commercial banking in 2012, and under his leadership, revenue more than doubled. In 2024, he became the co-head of global banking, before becoming co-head of the investment bank in 2025, the role he shared with Rohrbaugh.

Through his three decades at the firm, Petno became known as one of Dimon's close associates, with a finger on the pulse of top customers. Dimon described him as "a great client guy and a culture carrier" in an interview with Bloomberg at the beginning of last year, adding that he has a good sense of humor. The CEO has trusted him with big projects over the years, tapping him to help combine the corporate and investment banks and build up the firm's startup banking capabilities.

"I learned to observe the people and types of behavior I admire and embrace it, building it into my own style," Petno told Wabash in 2019 about his rise. "People took chances on me, including Jamie."

Rohrbaugh has been less of a public- and client-facing figure. A veteran trader who started at JPMorgan in 2005, he's built a reputation as someone who knows how to navigate risk — he said in an interview with Bloomberg last year that, being a trader by background, "I worry about everything." That skill could make him an attractive CEO candidate, an industry recruiter previously told Business Insider.

The 56-year-old studied political science and played football at Johns Hopkins, and started his finance career trading options at the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. He then worked at Banque Nationale and Goldman Sachs before joining JPMorgan's foreign-exchange business. Rohrbaugh helped stabilize and mature the business while pushing to modernize its technology capabilities. He's also served as head of global markets, and his experience at JPMorgan has spanned Asia, London, and New York.

Rohrbaugh was vaulted more publicly into the succession race when he became co-head of the commercial and investment bank in 2024.

In a video to Johns Hopkins' football team in 2023, Rohrbaugh, dressed in blue jeans, advised staying "calm under pressure" — potentially useful words of advice given his current circumstances.

Proving they're up for the job

Now that Rohrbaugh and Petno are locked into their roles as co-presidents — they each received a one-time $30 million retention bonus, according to an SEC filing — they'll need to prove they're up for the CEO job that's been synonymous with Dimon's name for decades.

Petno, as the sole head of the corporate and investment bank, has the chance to maintain his strong client relationships and impact on firm culture, Chris McGratty, an analyst at KBW, said in an email. On top of that, the veteran investment banker will need to demonstrate his handle on the markets business. He's also one of the people spearheading the Security & Resiliency Initiative, a $1.5 trillion effort that's a huge focus for Dimon.

Rohrbaugh, on the other hand, is now overseeing an entirely new group of people and line of business on Main Street rather than Wall Street, giving him wider insight into the sprawl that is JPMorgan. In his new position, he's overseeing more than 5,000 branches across the country. The new role could also address his more limited experience in high-profile leadership roles, which Mayo, the Wells Fargo analyst, described as a potential "shortfall."

With Dimon seemingly entrenched as CEO for at least a couple more years, the two men, former football and soccer players, have just started what might be the most public game of their lives. It seems all of Wall Street is filling the stands.

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Microsoft's Satya Nadella says every company should build its own AI model

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

George Chan/Getty Images

• Satya Nadella said firms should create AI models tailored to their unique business needs.
• Microsoft is embracing a multi-model AI strategy, hosting diverse models on its Azure AI Foundry.
• Nadella warns of economic risks if AI models are concentrated in the hands of a few companies.

If you own a company, Satya Nadella thinks you should build your own AI.

In an interview that went live Friday, Microsoft's CEO told Yash Patil, cofounder of Applied Compute, that every company should create AI models tailored to its own business.

"My simple thing is there should be as many models in the world as firms in the world," Nadella said. "Because after all, what is a firm? A firm is a learning system."

"I don't want to be locked into any one model," Nadella added. "I want to be able to use my own context, my own data — in fact, my own traces to maybe even take a much more open-weight, cost-efficient model or a fine-tuned model."

The comments mark one of Nadella's clearest visions yet for enterprise AI. Many companies rely on foundation models from a relatively small group of AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta.

Microsoft has increasingly embraced a multi-model strategy through Azure AI Foundry, which also hosts models such as DeepSeek and Cohere, rather than relying solely on OpenAI. Amazon has pursued a similar strategy with Bedrock, while Google Cloud offers a growing catalog of third-party and proprietary models alongside Gemini.

Many enterprises are also experimenting with open-weight AI models, which have publicly available parameters so that companies could fine-tune and deploy the AI themselves, such as Meta's Llama and Mistral's models.

Nadella said that AI concentration poses long-term economic risks.

"It can't be, 'Hey, look, I have two frontier models or three frontier models' or whatever, some finite set that have learned everything that is differentiated today in the economy because then it collapses,'" Nadella said.

"You can always buy a tool, you can even outsource a task or even a job, but you can't outsource your learning," Nadella added. "If you outsource your learning, then why exist?"

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This new research challenges nearly every big AI narrative of 2026

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar leads one of the most popular AI companies among chief information officers, said RBC.

Mike Segar/Reuters

• A new RBC survey of chief information officers and tech leaders shows no freakout over AI token budgets.
• The research found that OpenAI is the most popular among companies, outperforming Anthropic.
• Corporate customers are spending more on software while rapidly adopting hybrid AI pricing models.

New research from RBC Capital Markets turned up a string of unexpected findings that challenge many of the biggest AI narratives.

Every six months or so, Rishi Jaluria and other RBC tech analysts survey more than 100 chief information officers and other tech leaders to gauge spending on corporate IT. These annual budgets represent many billions of dollars.

And Jaluria is no AI cheerleader. He's urged caution when it comes to AI adoption by businesses. So I pay attention when he publishes.

This time, the message is clear: Companies are spending a lot on AI and are willing to spend even more.

"We came away encouraged by broad-based enterprise spending momentum into 2H 2026, with AI adoption beginning to transition from pilot to production," Jaluria wrote.

Surprise No. 1

For months, investors have worried that ballooning token bills would become AI's biggest headache. RBC's survey found the opposite.

Nearly nine in 10 respondents said token budgets are manageable, even though almost half have already exceeded their original spending plans.

A chart from a chief information officer survey by RBC.

RBC Capital Markets

Instead of scrambling to cut AI costs, most companies plan to spend even more on AI tokens in the future. (Token prices are likely to plunge, making returns on AI spending more attractive, so this makes sense).

A chart from a CIO survey by RBC.

RBC Capital Markets

OpenAI is way ahead

This result really caught my eye: OpenAI isn't just ahead — it's lapping the field.

Fifty-seven percent of respondents said ChatGPT is the AI model-based service they use most, compared with just 12% for Anthropic's Claude.

A chart from a CIO survey by RBC

RBC Capital Markets

OpenAI also comfortably leads on performance, with 44% naming it the highest-performing model provider versus 24% for Anthropic.

A chart from a CIO survey by RBC.

RBC Capital Markets

Sustained, and very large, business adoption of AI is required for successful IPOs by OpenAI and Anthropic.

SaaSwhat-alypse?

The long-predicted "SaaSpocalypse" has failed to show up so far, according to this survey.

The vast majority of respondents expect to spend more on software, and not a single respondent expects to spend less. Even companies spending more on AI largely aren't paying for it by gutting the rest of their software stack.

A chart from a CIO survey by RBC

RBC Capital Markets

From pilot to production

The survey also suggests enterprise AI has graduated from experimentation. Late last year, a similar survey from RBC raised concerns about enterprise AI adoption.

This time, more than half of respondents said AI is already in production, while another 35% expect to reach production within six months.

A chart from a CIO survey by RBC

RBC Capital Markets

New pricing catches on quick

Meanwhile, hybrid pricing models that combine seat licenses with usage-based pricing have quickly become the preferred way enterprises want to buy AI.

That's a remarkably fast shift for a market that typically adopts new technology at glacial speed.

A chart from a CIO survey by RBC

RBC Capital Markets

The 100% chart

Perhaps the most striking chart in the report is also the simplest: a solid blue circle showing 100% of respondents are allocating budget to AI and large language model projects.

A chart from a CIO survey by RBC

RBC Capital Markets

Of those, 91% said they're creating entirely new AI budgets rather than simply reshuffling existing spending — another sign that, for corporate America, the AI investment cycle is accelerating.

Sign up for BI's Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.

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I missed my chance to invest in Anthropic. Now I'm trying to trade my luxury NYC apartment for shares.

Sagar's apartment at 415 Washington St in Tribeca features a 20-foot-tall tree in the living room.

Francisco Rosario | DD-Reps

• Sebastian Sagar has listed his Tribeca apartment for $6.25M, accepting Anthropic shares as payment.
• He's seeking Anthropic stock after missing an opportunity to invest in the company's pre-IPO shares.
• The property has been on the market for over a year — accepting AI stock could help prevent a loss.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sebastian Sagar, who works in finance and is selling a $6.25 million luxury apartment in New York. He is accepting shares in Anthropic as part of a potential sale of the property. It has been edited for length and clarity.

A few years ago, I had an opportunity to buy pre-IPO shares in Anthropic. At the time, I passed. I thought there were better places to put my money.

Looking back, I wish I had taken the opportunity in the early investment round.

Now Anthropic is one of the most talked-about AI companies in the world, and I started thinking about whether there was another way to invest in it.

I own a luxury apartment in Tribeca that I no longer use. My life is in Florida now. I'm getting married and planning to start a family, so I won't be spending much time in New York City.

So I had an idea: What if I traded the apartment for Anthropic stock?

That's why my listing now says I'll consider accepting shares as part of a deal.

It may sound unconventional, but to me it makes perfect sense. Looking at my portfolio, I realized I was overweight in real estate. I already own a lot of property, and I want to invest more in AI.

The exterior patio overlooks the Tribeca neighborhood in New York.

Francisco Rosario | DD-Reps

When I bought the apartment, I was in a completely different stage of life. I loved spending time in New York, and it was a great home base. Then I met my fiancée. Almost overnight, my priorities changed. We built our lives in Florida and decided we weren't looking back.

I still love New York. I'm actually very bullish on the city long term. Even though the market is rough right now, New York has survived and reinvented itself countless times.

The apartment itself is beautiful. It's in northwest Tribeca, which I think is one of the best neighborhoods in the city. It's quiet, safe, family-oriented, and the building is incredible.

I'll genuinely miss it when it's gone. But I don't want to be a landlord or spend my time managing a rental property from another state. I want to focus on my work and on investing. So I decided it was time to sell.

I bought the apartment for about $7 million at the end of 2024. When I listed it in June 2025, I didn't imagine I'd still be talking about it a year later.

Since then, I've lowered the asking price to $6.25 million, changed brokers, and explored different ways to attract the right buyer. The idea of trading for Anthropic stock didn't come until I read that the company was opening an office a few blocks away.

If I'm going to sell an asset that no longer fits my life, I'd rather turn it into an investment I genuinely want to own for the long term.

I started imagining Anthropic employees sitting on valuable pre-IPO equity that they can't easily access. They can't simply sell their shares whenever they want, and traditional banks aren't lining up to lend against private-company stock. Meanwhile, I was sitting on an apartment I wanted to convert into a different type of investment.

The kitchen features dark marble countertops and massive windows.

Francisco Rosario | DD-Reps

It felt like a situation where both sides could solve each other's problems. Someone could acquire a home within walking distance of work. I could gain exposure to a company I believe has enormous long-term potential.

That's what attracted me to the idea.

I'm not exclusively interested in Anthropic. I'd be open to OpenAI shares, too. If someone from another major tech company wanted to structure a creative deal, I'd listen, but Anthropic is the company that first came to mind because I had the chance to invest before and missed it.

And yes, I would seriously consider taking Anthropic stock rather than cash.

If two buyers came to me tomorrow and one offered all cash while another offered Anthropic shares, I'd be inclined to take the stock deal. Even if the tech buyer came in under the asking price, I'd still prefer it — if I accepted a stock deal below my asking price, I believe the future growth of a company like Anthropic could more than offset the difference.

That's because I believe strongly in where AI is headed. I use these tools every day, and I think we're still in the early innings. Companies like Anthropic haven't even scratched the surface of how AI could be used in healthcare, education, and other industries.

As an investor, that's exciting to me. I'm simply trying to move from one asset that no longer fits my life into another asset that I think has tremendous future potential.

Most people sell a property and take the cash — I'm just trying something a little different.

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Palo Alto Networks CEO: We're in 'a Darwinian moment' where employees have to prove their AI skills

Palo Alto CEO Nikesh Arora sees companies reducing G&A roles like HR and marketing as AI models and tools advance.

Jeenah Moon/Reuters

• Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora said 90% of enterprise employees aren't "AI savvy."
• The cybersecurity CEO said the struggle is how to overhaul workforces to meet the moment.
• Arora said Palo Alto Networks is only hiring its technical roles from hackathons.

Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora says enterprises don't have the workforces they need for the AI moment.

"The challenge right now is 90% of the enterprise employees are not AI savvy," Arora said during a recent episode of the "20VC" podcast.

Arora said the issue is there's no training course he can send his 21,000 employees at the cybersecurity firm to. It's on them to level up and help the company that has a total market cap over $235 billion.

"They have to be able to learn on their own," he said. "I think we're back to a Darwinian moment where everybody has to figure out who's really good."

Other companies, Arora said, are facing this reality and choosing to respond with mass layoffs. The former top executive at Google and SoftBank specifically referenced Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Block CEO Jack Dorsey.

"You've seen people like Brian Armstrong and Jack Dorsey go out and say, 'I'm going to decimate my organization and I'm going to start building from scratch,'" Arora said. "And they've gone to some version of 30 to 40% less people because they've figured out there's no redemption. I can't train these people. I'm going to just find the people who are going to come in and help me do this stuff."

Dorsey announced in February that Block was laying off over 4,000 workers, nearly half of the company. The former Twitter CEO said the company was doing well but needed to be "honest" about how AI, what he called "intelligence tools" was changing the status quo.

In May, Coinbase announced it was laying off 14% of its workforce, affecting about 700 roles. Armstrong wrote in an email to employees, which he posted on X, that cuts were designed to make the crypto company "leaner, faster, and more efficient for our next phase of growth."

Arora said Palo Alto Networks has a different approach. Instead of large-scale layoffs, the cybersecurity firm is using natural attrition to gradually replace workers. He said the company also knows exactly where to find future technical workers.

"We've been hiring people only through hackathons," he said, referencing technical roles. "Give me 12 months, I'll have sort of transformed 20, 25% of my team," he added. "Give me three years, I'll have hopefully enough AI savvy people working at Palo Alto."

The company is continuing to grow. Palo Alto Networks has added 5,423 total employees to its headcount from the end of fiscal 2025 to the third quarter of 2026, according to its most recent 10-Q filing.

How Palo Alto Networks will change

That doesn't mean every role at the company will grow in the same way.

Arora questioned why he needs "400, 600 people in marketing" when frontier models can already be trained on marketing strategies and a company's specific voice.

"My biggest problem in marketing is I have 600 people, but I'm not sure they all fully understand how to consistently deliver my tone of voice, my value proposition, and how not to break my brand by having different collaterals in public domain," he said.

Arora said his "rule of thumb" is that in the next three years companies will "probably have half of the people" in general and administrative roles like marketing, HR, and finance. In that time, Arora said AI applications will advance to the point of being able to replace a lot of the work those employees do.

One of those advancements will be when AI models/tools more freely express their opinions by providing feedback to human users.

"Your scholar, whether you want to call it an AI assistant, AI marketing assistant, AI HR assistant, is going to say, 'I looked at your copy, it sucks. It's not good enough It's not consistent with a tone of voice. Here's what I would recommend,'" he said. "This has an opinion. That will make my average employee much smarter than they were today. Then I don't need so many of them because they're doing most of the work for you."

At the same time, Arora said he wants many more technical and sales resources. Arora previously said he wants more cybersecurity engineers and researchers in the future. During the 20VC interview, he said he has employees who want AI resources to help implement plans to transform marketing and HR.

"I think there's this fallacy people believe we're going to have less people working because AI is going to take over our jobs," he said. "I don't believe that. I think what's going to happen is you can't imagine the number of people on my team who want more technical resources, more AI savvy resources because they want to do exactly these things."

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Meta's reckoning has arrived

Wally Skalij/Getty; Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI

Early last year, Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, had a clear message for his staff. "You should quit if you feel that way," he told one employee who said workers were being treated poorly. "You should consider working elsewhere," he told another person who questioned controversial changes at the business. He was reinforcing the company Meta had spent the last few years trying to become: a lean, fast, high-pressure organization that no longer had the patience for internal debate. "You can leave," Bosworth said, "or disagree and commit."

But this month, in a memo and a meeting with employees, Bosworth sounded like a different person. Morale is "probably one of the worst it's ever been," he said, adding that the business had done "an atrocious job" with its recent restructuring. "We've undermined the trust you have that your specific expertise and contribution will be valued."

Since 2022, Meta has remade itself around a ruthless management playbook that helped define a new era in Silicon Valley. Through relentless layoffs and many other unpopular decisions, executives charged ahead, emboldened by record profits and apparently immune to the building discontent. Bosworth's comments last week were different — an acknowledgement that Meta's leadership may finally be confronting the costs of its actions.

Meta's workforce is at a breaking point. Employees in the UK are trying to form a labor union, decrying executives' "cruel and shortsighted behaviors." More than 1,600 workers have signed a petition demanding that Meta stop tracking employees' keystrokes to improve its AI models. As Wired reported this month, things have gotten so bad that one frustrated employee hijacked a livestreamed meeting with a profanity-laced outburst directed at an executive. Another compared working in a new AI-training unit to the gulag. Others are so dejected they're actually praying to get laid off so they can leave with at least some severance.

Against this backdrop, Bosworth was one of several executives in recent weeks scrambling to do damage control. Chief Product Officer Chris Cox acknowledged the "insanity of this company" that created a "difficult" and "brutal" environment. CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted "we've made mistakes."

It's unthinkable that Mark Zuckerberg would be a credible spokesman for change.Sandra Sucher, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School

"It's a classic example of chickens coming home to roost," says Sandra Sucher, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. "They have almost systematically destroyed trust. They are trying to figure out how to dig themselves out of the hole that they dug."

The digging started with a mass layoff of 11,000 people in late 2022, which Zuckerberg was at least apologetic about. The company then slashed another 10,000 jobs the next spring in what Zuckerberg hailed as a "year of efficiency," and then another 3,600 in 2025 that he said was to get rid of "low performers," effectively torpedoing some workers' job searches (many of them, it turned out, had received good performance reviews). In March this year, news leaked that the company was about to ax even more jobs, but it didn't confirm the cuts for weeks and didn't notify those affected until May, sending everyone into a nauseating, two-month purgatory. In April, amid the limbo, Meta announced it would start tracking employees' keystrokes, stoking fears that the company wanted to automate their work. And in May, as it laid off 8,000 employees, it reassigned another 7,000, many of them to menial jobs that involve training AI. Meta declined to comment on this story.

In a meeting with Instagram employees this month, Cox compared working there to "running a marathon in the middle of a hailstorm and then, like, your teammate gets replaced and then we're recording you." He added: "It's like what the fuck."

For employees caught in the hailstorm, it must have felt validating for an executive to empathize with their situation. But surely he and the rest of Meta's leadership knew all these things would make employees unhappy, and yet they did them anyway. So why the sudden mea culpa?

Perhaps all the anger, dissatisfaction, and open rebellion was harming productivity. Or the particularly public nature of Meta's dysfunction, with the crescendo of news reports, had become a liability for its reputation with investors. Or maybe executives finally realized what had become patently obvious to everyone else — that whatever Meta was doing just wasn't working. The whole point of adopting this hard-charging management style was to get employees to innovate faster and catch up to competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the all-consuming battle over AI. Instead, Meta has been falling farther and farther behind. Last year, the company delayed — and ultimately never released — what was supposed to be its flagship AI model after engineers reportedly struggled to improve its capabilities; this year, it has repeatedly pushed back another model's rollout to developers.

Which raises the question: Was the post-2022 Meta a huge mistake? Decades of management research suggest fear and instability are a surefire way to hemorrhage star employees, struggle with recruiting new hires, and suppress the kind of creative risk-taking that leads to meaningful breakthroughs.

"I hope we can rekindle the best of the culture we joined," Bosworth said. "One where people have the psychological safety to take risks and do the right thing over a long period of time."

Sucher, who studies trust inside organizations, says executives are making the right move by acknowledging what they did wrong. So are the small concessions they have made in recent weeks, including promising to reduce the size of teams managers oversee, scale back the keystroke-monitoring program, and increase budgets for social events so employees spend more time with each other. Employees who had been reassigned to AI training roles also now have the opportunity to opt into a different role of their choice, the company announced internally this week.

But the real first step, Sucher advises, is for Zuckerberg himself to offer a proper apology that actually includes the word "sorry." And most importantly, she says, Zuckerberg needs to make a credible commitment that he won't keep making the same fundamental error: treating his employees as if they're not human beings deserving of respect and care. That means understanding that workers don't watch their colleagues get laid off, submit to surveillance, and get moved into unwanted assignments — and then magically go back to doing their best work.

"It's very hard to turn the ship on these things," she says. "Usually, it requires a new leader. It's unthinkable that Mark Zuckerberg would be a credible spokesman for change."

Whether that ship will actually turn is a big question for the 70,000 or so people who remain at Meta. It also matters for the rest of the tech industry. We now look back at November 2022, when Meta became the first tech giant to conduct mass layoffs, as the beginning of Silicon Valley's take-no-prisoners era. Will Meta executives' recent comments mark a real course correction at the company and beyond — or just a temporary pause before they return to their harsher ways?

There are some hopeful glimmers. In recent months, both Google and Microsoft have been opting to offer voluntary buyouts over mass layoffs, a more humane approach that helps preserve morale. Zuckerberg himself has promised a period of stability, pledging to hold off on any more big job cuts — at least through the end of the year.

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Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.

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