Meta’s CTO told employees to stop asking for more time off and use AI gains to build “cooler stuff” instead

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Credit: UK Home Office

TL;DR<br>Meta CTO Bosworth told employees AI gains should go into more work, not more time off. Called the Meta Days vacation question “very dumb.” Meta cut 8,000 jobs this year while spending $135B on AI.

Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth told employees at a July Q&A that AI productivity gains should be used to build more products, not to take more time off. An employee had asked whether the gains could be channelled into reviving “Meta Days,” a cancelled holiday programme that gave staff a few extra days off. Bosworth’s answer was blunt: “Stop asking about Meta Days. It’s very dumb.”

“I hope that what we do with our extra time is do even more and cooler stuff for the users who use our products every day,” Bosworth said, according to three people on the call. “I get an extra hour. You know what I do with it? I put it into that.” He told the employee to ask their parents what they would think of using every chance to talk to a boss to request more days off. He later said he was sorry for coming down “too hard” and acknowledged the question may have been “tongue-in-cheek.”

The comments land in a specific context. Meta cut 8,000 jobs in May while spending up to $135 billion on AI infrastructure this year. The company replaced its cancelled Meta Days with two “choice days” and provides four weeks off plus public holidays. Bosworth himself stands to earn up to $921 million from a stock option programme tied to Meta reaching a $9 trillion valuation by 2031. The message to employees is that AI makes them more productive, the company keeps the productivity, and the reward is the privilege of building more.

The broader debate is whether AI productivity gains belong to workers or employers. Jeff Bezos has said he expects AI to let households return to a single earner. Morgan Stanley predicted AI would help millions take on second and third jobs. Bosworth’s position is the employer’s version: more output, same hours, no extra days. At a company that cut 10% of its workforce this year, told survivors to train their AI replacements, and installed keystroke-tracking software on employee laptops, the answer to “can we have more time off?” was always going to be no. Bosworth just said it out loud.

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Alina Maria Stan

Alina Maria Stan builds connections that people actually feel. As co-founder and COO of Tekpon, she turns product intuition into real moment (show all)

Alina Maria Stan builds connections that people actually feel. As co-founder and COO of Tekpon, she turns product intuition into real moments of discovery, shaping how teams find and adopt SaaS every day. Since 2020, she has led Tekpon’s brand voice, media strategy, and growth plays with a clear focus on human outcomes behind every metric.<br>Before Tekpon, Alina followed curiosity across industries and countries. She was CEO of King Casino Bonus and led affiliate and brand strategy at Extremoo Media and Fable Media in Denmark, where she learned how to build partnerships that last. Early on, she sharpened her CRM and pricing instincts at K.H. ApS, always asking why customers choose what they choose.<br>Her approach is rooted in more than a decade of international experience and two master’s degrees, one in Sustainable Consumption from the Technical University of Munich and one in Consumer Affairs Management from Aarhus University.

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