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

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.