Meta’s latest internal reorganization has brought simmering tensions at the top of the company into sharper focus, revealing a strained relationship between CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the firm’s highest-paid employee, Alexandr Wang.
Wang, the 28-year-old founder recruited in a blockbuster $14 billion deal to spearhead Meta’s artificial intelligence ambitions, is said by multiple sources close to the company to be increasingly frustrated with Zuckerberg’s highly hands-on management style, which he reportedly finds constraining. At the same time, skepticism is growing among Meta employees over whether Wang has the experience needed to lead what is widely seen as a $600 billion bet on AI.
The friction became more visible during a key strategy meeting last autumn, when Wang’s TBD Lab team clashed with senior Meta executives Chris Cox and Andrew Bosworth. Cox and Bosworth advocated training Wang’s new AI model on Instagram and Facebook data to strengthen Meta’s core advertising-driven business. Wang resisted, arguing that Meta should prioritize closing the gap with rivals like OpenAI and Google before tailoring models for product-specific applications. In his view, diverting focus too early could slow progress toward building world-class AI systems.
This disagreement has reinforced a growing cultural divide within the company. Researchers aligned with Wang reportedly see Meta’s long-established leadership as product-focused veterans anchored in the social media era, while they themselves are focused on pursuing advanced AI and even artificial general intelligence. Rumors have also circulated internally that as much as $2 billion may have been reallocated from Bosworth’s Reality Labs budget to Wang’s team—claims Meta has denied, though speculation continues.
Concerns about Wang’s leadership have intensified as the AI race accelerates. In November, Yann LeCun, Meta’s renowned AI scientist and a Turing Award laureate, departed the company rather than report to Wang. Sources say LeCun was uncomfortable taking direction from someone whose background lay in data labeling rather than frontier AI research. Earlier, Nat Friedman, another high-profile recruit, reportedly faced pressure to speed up development timelines. That urgency culminated in the rushed rollout of Vibes, Meta’s AI-driven video feed, leaving parts of Friedman’s team frustrated at being pushed to compete with OpenAI’s Sora before they felt ready.
Together, these developments suggest that Meta’s ambitious push into AI is being complicated not just by external competition, but by internal disagreements over leadership, strategy, and the company’s future direction.
