Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘Year of Efficiency’ spreads from Meta to Priscilla Chan’s charitable organization, which just laid off dozens of people

• The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is a charitable vehicle for the wealthy couple.
• CZI just conducted its first layoff, not long after Meta laid off thousands of workers.
• One worker referred to the cuts as a “bloodbath.”

This week, the charitable foundation of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan laid off its first employees.

According to two people familiar with the company, the cuts at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative affected 48 employees. One verified CZI employee confirmed the layoffs in a Wednesday post to Blind, a popular app among tech workers, calling it a “bloodbath.”

On Wednesday afternoon, Insider asked CZI spokeswoman Raymonde Charles if the organization had laid off any employees. She didn’t respond at first. More than an hour later, The 74 Million, a website about education co-founded by Campbell Brown, a vice president at Meta, reported the job cuts.

Following the publication of that report, Charles sent an email to Insider with the subject “I can confirm the details here.”

“Guided by insights from our grantees, research, and educators, our education work continues to evolve, and the structure of our teams has changed as a result,” she said in a statement.

Chan, a doctor, co-founded and co-CEO of CZI with Zuckerberg, whom she met while they were undergraduates at Harvard. They married in 2012 and launched CZI at the end of 2015.

The foundation’s initial goal was to serve as a vehicle for the couple to donate nearly all of their massive wealth amassed through Meta, formerly known as Facebook, to charitable causes. They desired to eliminate all diseases, improve education, and reform the criminal justice system. CZI’s original tagline was “Advancing human potential and promoting equal opportunity.”

That tagline no longer exists. CZI’s current areas of focus are broadly science, education, and community, all of which it is attempting to improve through impact investing and grants. According to the organization, it has granted $4.9 billion through the end of 2022 and invested an additional $300 million in ventures that “align” with its values.

According to one person familiar with the cuts, the majority of the Wednesday layoffs affected CZI’s education team, leaving the person wondering what the future of CZI’s educational work will be.

Zuckerberg is one of the world’s wealthiest people, with a net worth of more than $100 billion. Employees at Meta have been laid off since November, as the company sought to cut costs in the face of slowing revenue growth and massive expenses on Zuckerberg’s metaverse ambitions.

Eventually, Zuckerberg declared 2023 to be Meta’s “Year of Efficiency,” extolling the benefits of encouraging employees to do more with less. That mandate appears to have extended to the CEO’s charitable initiative as well.