The FaceBook currently known as Meta for one failed venture that incinerated nearly $100 billion in cash for its failed transformation to a virtual reality hub while laying off thousands, is at it again.
As we previewed a few weeks ago, Meta - which inexplicably hasn't changed its name to AIbook yet - will proceed with the first wave of mass layoffs planned for this year on May 20, with more coming later, Reuters reported citing sources.
The Facebook and Instagram owner will lay off about 10% of its global workforce, or close to 8,000 employees, in that initial round, as it swaps headcount for GPUs.
And that's just the start: the company is planning further layoffs in the second half of the year, although details of those cuts, including date and size, have yet to be determined and will depend on just how much more money Meta burns in its experiment to prove that AI will actually generate positive cash flow.
Last month, Reuters reported that the company was planning to lay off 20% or more of its global workforce.
Meta's layoffs this year will be the social media giant's most significant since a restructuring in late 2022 and early 2023 that it dubbed the "year of efficiency," when it eliminated about 21,000 jobs. At that time, Meta's stock was in freefall and the company was struggling to correct for COVID-era growth assumptions that ultimately proved unsustainable. It will soon find itself in the same hole again.
The Menlo Park-based company employed nearly 79,000 people as of December 31.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into AI as he seeks to dramatically reshape his company’s core business around the technology, which has yet to generate any material returns proportional to the massive capex spend. In its latest earnings call, META raised its 2026 capex guidance to a record $115-$135 billion, more than double the prior years, and drastically more than anything META spent during the peak of its virtual reality phase.
Meta is not alone: Amazonrecently trimmed 30,000 corporate employees, representing nearly 10% of its white-collar workers, while in February the fintech company Block fired nearly half of its staff. In both of those cases, executives tied the cuts to efficiency gains from artificial intelligence. Of course, nobody actually think how mass layoffs of the best paid job in the US - Information - will impact end demand for AI if in a few years, America's (formerly) best paid workers are struggling to pay their San Fran rent, let alone pay for the latest chatbot du jour.
Layoffs.fyi, a website tracking tech job cuts around the world, reported that 73,212 employees have lost their jobs so far this year. For all of 2024, the figure was 153,000.
While META is in a more comfortable financial position now than it was during the 2022/23 purges, executives envision a future of fewer management layers and greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers. Assuming of course the AI bubble doesn't burst sooner as the market realizes the trillions in spending promises by the likes of OpenAI will never materialize.
Meta's shares are up 3.68% since the start of the year, although they are down from a record high achieved last summer. Last year, it generated more than $200 billion of revenue and achieved a $60 billion profit despite outsized spending on artificial intelligence.
In a rerun of its catastrophic foray into virtual reality, in recent weeks, Meta has reorganized teams in its Reality Labs division and transferred engineers from throughout the company into a new “Applied AI” organization tasked with accelerating the development of AI agents that can write code and carry out complex tasks autonomously; expect this to pivot into whatever the AI buzzword of the day is.
Tyler Durden Fri, 04/17/2026 - 17:20Authored by Scott Yenor via American Greatness,
The failure of the United States Senate to pass the SAVE America Act is as regrettable as it is predictable. Noncitizen voting is already a federal crime in America. SAVE would have required voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote. States would have to purge noncitizens from voting rolls, too.
Perhaps reliance on hostile state officials to implement the law would have rendered the SAVE America Act ineffective. We will never know.
The cause of election integrity is not dead. Congress has the constitutional power to ensure election integrity.
The American election system divides power between the states and the federal government.
States determine the “time, place, and manner” of elections and, within constitutional limits, determine who can vote.
Some states allow mail-in ballots. Others, like Oregon, send every voter a ballot. Other states allow mail-in ballots under special circumstances. Some states allow ballots to arrive well after Election Day. Some states require no identification for voters. Some wink at noncitizens voting. Others have rigorous identification requirements. Some countenance practices that sow the appearance of cheating into the counting of votes. Other states have clean elections that bring election results right away on election night.
But Congress has a plenary power to judge whether a state’s election results are consistent with the basic demands of representative government.
According to Article 1, Section 5 of the United States Constitution, “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns, and Qualifications of its own Members.”
Congress can ferret out fraudulent votes of all sorts—not just voting by noncitizens.
Congress can then declare elections invalid and order a new election when it judges elections to be fraudulent.
Both the Senate and the House have pre-established procedures for investigation, including the power to subpoena state officials and state voting data. This power helps Congress ensure its own integrity.
Hundreds of House elections have been challenged in American history. Often, complaints are frivolous. Sometimes complaints involve qualifications, strictly speaking. Albert Gallatin had his election to the U.S. Senate voided by a 14–12 vote in 1794 because he had not been a citizen for nine years.
Other investigations, like the McLane–Farr dispute from the 1918 election, concern corruption pure and simple. Patrick McLane was originally declared the winner in a Pennsylvania race, but once evidence of “wholesale fraud and illegality” from fictitious voters and voters who were not citizens came to light, Congress determined that John Farr won.
In the late 1990s, Loretta Sanchez defeated Congressman Bob Dornan by fewer than 1,000 votes. Dornan challenged the election. Congress found that more than 700 illegal votes were cast. Since it was not enough to sway the election, Dornan’s challenge was dropped.
Investigations into election integrity were especially common after the Civil War, when Democrat-secessionist voting practices led to severe undercounting of Republican votes in the South.
Voter intimidation compromised the entire voting environment.
Today, Republicans fear that similar broad-scale corruption plagues blue states like California, Illinois, Michigan, and Oregon, all of which seem to have weak voter identification laws, poor audit procedures, lax voter purging techniques, and a fear of federal investigations into their practices.
Are elections within these states outside the margin of fraud? To know the answer, we would have to know the margin of fraud in those states. And that requires congressional investigations.
Democrat establishments have little incentive to clean up their elections. They benefit from the fraud that keeps them in power, so they are wary of actually investigating their own elections. State election systems are not completely subject to federal oversight.
There are many reasons not to have confidence in Oregon’s elections for the national legislature, for instance. Noncitizens are welcomed and registered. Many counties have had more than 100 percent registrations among voters. Mail-in ballots are ubiquitous and automatic. Dead people or people who have moved out of state have voted in past elections, and Oregon has been particularly lax in purging its voting rolls. Oregon’s federal elections would be worth a serious look from Congress, especially federal races decided by less than 10,000 votes.
If Oregon does not want to fix its elections, it need not. The state must simply pay the penalty for porous elections by not having representation in the U.S. House or Senate.
Congress has the constitutional means and the motives to police state elections, not with new laws but with its investigatory powers.
If the rest of the country can have confidence in their elections, Congress would, no doubt, seat a delegation. Congress could deny representation to states without voter identification laws or those that wink at foreign nationals voting in their elections. Or Congress could require new elections when voting rolls are not properly purged.
Congress has the power to determine whether states have a republican form of government. States with rigged elections do not have republican governments. And Congress can dust off its own powers to ensure the integrity of the election of its own members, even without the SAVE America Act.
Tyler Durden Fri, 04/17/2026 - 17:00In a candid interview with Human Events editor Jack Posobiec, former Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) alleged that blackmail and sexual honeypot operations are far more prevalent than the American public is aware of.
Cawthorn, who was elected to represent North Carolina's 11th congressional district at just 25 years old in 2020, described the typical path these lurrid situations take. It often begins at donor dinners or late-night votes, when members unwind with drinks or head back toward Capitol Hill. While many lawmakers prefer socializing with fellow congressmen to avoid complications with staffers or outside interests, invitations can quickly turn strangely personal.
"Normally, the way I found that these things start getting off the ground is that it starts out—you’re maybe at a donor dinner or getting dinner after a late night of votes,” Cawthorn said. "Then, you know, everyone has friends inside of Congress, so you start hanging out with friends. Maybe you’re grabbing drinks, or on the way back to Capitol Hill, heading back to your homes."
"Then you start building these relationships, and most congressmen like to hang out with other congressmen, just because there are so many problems when you hang out with staffers or people with different angles in other parts of the Beltway, the former lawmaker continued. "I will tell you, normally, the way I came across this is that people start inviting me and saying, “Hey, why don’t you come back? My wife would love to hang out with you, and we can see what could be going on here. I think we’d have a really good time if we all got together in this way.”
"Then you start piecing it together and say, “Wait a minute, what kind of invitation is this? This sounds really weird. What do you mean leave my phone at the house?” That doesn’t make any sense—these random things they’re saying. It becomes very clear what they’re looking for. That’s the big one—“check your phone at the door,” that kind of thing,” he added.
WATCH: Madison Cawthorn explains how honeytrapping operations work in US Congress
"Once they have you on video they own you"pic.twitter.com/OVGCx4a7s9
Cawthorn told Posobiec that he made it clear he had zero interest in such activities.
"I’ve got a phenomenal life. I was only 25 years old when I was in Congress, so that didn’t interest me whatsoever. I thought the majority of people in the United States were very cognizant of that. So I came out and talked about it, and they tried to destroy me for it,” Cawthorn said.
Cawthorn lost his bid for reelection in the 2022 North Carolina Republican primary, falling to state Sen. Chuck Edwards (R), who later went on to win the general election.
"I’ll tell you, there were 16 people that I really hold responsible - the architects of trying to take down my political career,” Cawthorn explained. "I want you to ask yourselves: out of all the people who came out against me or sent funds to make sure I was pushed out of Congress, where are those people now?”
"I’m very happy that I was able to take the majority of them down, or that the majority of them are now out of office or have terrible personal lives at this point. But I will tell you, there are so many people inside Washington, D.C., that have much worse on them than what’s going on inside of this video,” he concluded.
Tyler Durden Fri, 04/17/2026 - 16:40