Basically pulling jobs out of other territories and concentrating on being all-American where possible is going to sell to President Shart & chums more than the multinational aspect.
As an aside from that though, recent & planned changes in UK regulation are trying to put more onus on social media companies to police their dungeons, and they don't like that. I'm sure this aggravation has a causal relationship with Musk getting very anti-UK-government ATM (spreading “facts” about them that range from somewhat dubious down to outright lies & calls for vigilantism) – trying to push attention away from SM and its role in various problems. Pulling out of the UK will reduce their legal (and financial) risk exposure with regard to these regulation changes.
I should have been a bit more specific: as all-GOP-American as possible.
Imported workers are just fine, even though that is not something you'd derive from many a campaign speech, particularly for specialist workers as vaguely defined by the H1B system which have an indirect benefit of adding a bit of brain-drain friction to potentially competing companies in other economies, as well as shoring up the effect of temporary local skills deficiencies.
But work being done in non-American jurisdictions where the regulatory demands of other governments might affect how an American company can gouge out a profit is what causes upset. That and other regulatory demands suggesting SM companies make effort to crack down on some of the “free to speak hate” problems, which the current powers-that-be that side of the pond don't actually see as problems. Or simply that work being done elsewhere is money going into someone else's economy ‑ while many H1B workers will be sending some money back to family elsewhere, they won't be sending most of it as they need to clothe themselves, eat, pay rent, have a few luxuries, etc.
> Imported workers are just fine, even though that is not something you'd derive from many a campaign speech, particularly for specialist workers as vaguely defined by the H1B system which have an indirect benefit of adding a bit of brain-drain friction to potentially competing companies in other economies, as well as shoring up the effect of temporary local skills deficiencies.
I and others did interpret this, and recalled what they said about that matter.
Wasn't part of the campaign directly but Trump and Elon both made this very apparent.
The next president will have significant sway over decisions that will likely impact the tech sector’s direction. If the pendulum swings the “wrong” way, companies like Meta will face increased scrutiny, anti-trust investigations, regulatory oversight, and the like. If the pendulum swings the “right” way, companies will continue to enjoy free rein over their business practices.
Moving jobs back to the US (or appearing to), cancelling DEI programmes which are not approved of by the incoming administration, etc all lines up with this.
The more difficult question is whether Meta is the chicken or the egg. OP suggests Meta are courting Trump’s approval. I’m not so sure that Meta didn’t help put him there in the first place.
Making a display to signal one’s willingness to mate and intended to impress a target audience, in this case the incoming administration.
It’ll absolutely work, too. The new President loves to hear how good his ideas are.
He’s been speaking lately (on JRE just a few days back too if I’m not mistaken) about the responsibility of the US government to protect US companies abroad rather than hurting them at home. This was targeted specifically at Trump, and trying to encourage him to get on Meta’s side with regulators.
He also said on JRE that the Biden administration would yell down the phone at his staff for not censoring facts, this is to rile up the GOP in Congress to pressure Trump to be seen doing the opposite and standing up for free speech (as Meta defines it).
Do you happen to know why? The other replies are all providing a narrative that it is related to the new US administration, but as you say it wasn't very clear who would win until the results were counted. So if it's been happening for a year it couldn't be related to that.
Speculation. Brexit (one of the greatest self-owns in political history, though the US is trying to top it) and the UK continue to tighten general travel/immigration rules. London used to be a great spot to have a companies EU presence. Brexit has only amplified London as primarily a bank for world criminals. Companies eventually wonder what's the point of being in the UK when they still need EU presence anyway.
I only have second hand accounts but I've heard the Instagram CEO just hated having employees in London (/ outside of the US) and therefore started with closing Instagram positions there. Then the rest is following.
And to be clear I'm not sure a UK employee is that much cheaper than a US one. The salary is not THAT far off between the two, especially when converting from GBP to USD, and employers have a lot more social charges to pay on top of salaries in the UK and Europe.
If you add the cost of collaborating across very spread timezones, I really don't think hiring outside of the US is that much cheaper.
