This is a classic CEO temperature-shift. Not sure if there's a name for the tactic, but I've seen it before and suspect many others here have. It signals a shift from expansion to contraction.
You naturally also see this tactic around layoffs. My first experience was after about 25% of the startup I was working for went away. At the "after" all-hands, the CEO went from friendly optimist to angry boss, using notable lines about how if people want cushy jobs, they should go work for the post office.
The logic is clearly that, when the pie is shrinking, inducing more fear makes employees more pliable. You're going to lose the good ones, of course.
Ignoring the pop-pysch correlation of CEO's to sociopaths, I think that seeing your business going through a contraction would be pretty stressful for a CEO. It's a moment where you actually have to not just fly at cruising settings but actually do stuff and hustle.
This is a moment for facebook where things could just start to slide and slide away.
Zuck strikes me as a guy who whilst smart, is also kinda lucky and benefiting greatly from the other smart people who work for him. But facebook is causing many social problems and hard working people who do sit back in their chair's probably have the 'are we the baddies' moment pretty often. If a critical peer group of his leave, he'll start to feel a stranger in his own company.
It's going to be an interesting time for us in the cheap seats.
You earn millions of dollars for essentially keeping the trains running on time by instructing your minions to keep the trains on time, and then the market says we need new tracks and new trains and everyone's getting off your trains.
You'd be grumpy too, when the minions look at you and ask for a spec and a strategy and you realize your going to have to do work for the first time ever.
Consider MSFT, not the biggest fan but, they make stuff and can change and improve your life with it. They have a revenue of ~200bn, Meta is ~80bn, but what do they actually make?
It's not a totally worthless company but it's been trading on the fact it got to be the first decent social graph company for the last two decades.
And you still shouldn't get mad at your employees. It's part of your job (not to mention basic human decency) to not get mad at your employees for something that isn't remotely their fault.
You naturally also see this tactic around layoffs. My first experience was after about 25% of the startup I was working for went away. At the "after" all-hands, the CEO went from friendly optimist to angry boss, using notable lines about how if people want cushy jobs, they should go work for the post office.
The logic is clearly that, when the pie is shrinking, inducing more fear makes employees more pliable. You're going to lose the good ones, of course.