A 2010 email from an angry Mark Zuckerberg, asking a Facebook employee to ‘resign’ has appeared for the first time on social media, and has come up at a time when the company, now known as Meta, is under fire for laying off more than 20,000 employees, who were handed pinks slips across two rounds.
The email was sent on September 22, 2010, at 11:44 am, three days after TechCrunch broke a story that said Facebook was ‘secretly’ building a mobile phone. Interestingly, Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook parent Meta Platforms, sent a common email to the tech giant’s staff, and asked ‘whoever leaked the story,’ to ‘resign immediately.’
“Lots of you saw the TechCrunch story over the weekend claiming that we’re building a mobile phone. We’re not building a phone and I spoke at length at the Q&A on Friday about what we’re actually doing – building ways to make all phones and app more social,” said the entrepreneur.
The-then 26-year-old went on to describe the leak as ‘frustrating and destructive,’ and an ‘act of betrayal.’ He continued: “The fact that the story was inaccurate doesn’t make it any better. I’ve had to personally spend a lot of time over the last few days – as have a lot of other people – cleaning up the damage from this mess.”
Zuckerberg then warned this unidentified individual to leave on their own, or else the organisation would ‘amost certainly find out who you are anyway.’
He concluded his message by stressing that promoting openness and transparency was ‘culturally important’ at Facebook, and he was committed to continue with this. This open culture, however, would not be at the cost of the confidential information shared internally, Zuckerberg noted.
