An old email that appeared on social media for the first time on Tuesday shows an enraged Mark Zuckerberg asking a Facebook employee to "please resign". The employee was accused of leaking inaccurate information about the social network's future plans. The Facebook CEO was upset over a TechCrunch story that said the company is secretly building a phone. Mr Zuckerberg said the leaked info was an "act of betrayal". The 2010 email has been published by Internal Tech Emails.
The message begins with a line "Confidential - Do Not Share" and blasted the leak.
"Lots of you saw the TechCrunch story over the weekend claiming that we're building a mobile phone. We're not building a phone and I spoke at length at the Q&A... about what we're actually doing - building ways to make all phones and apps more social," Mr Zuckerberg said in the September 2010 email.
"This was an act of betrayal," read one of the lines. "So I'm asking whoever leaked this to resign immediately," the CEO raged.
"If you believe that it's ever appropriate to leak internal information, you should leave. If you don't resign, we will almost certainly find out who you are anyway," Mr Zuckerberg added.
Facebook, which now comes under a new brand Meta, has laid off thousands of employees as part of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls the company's "year of efficiency" as the US tech sector continues to downsize.
In an email to employees earlier this month, Mr Zuckerberg said Meta would shed 10,000 jobs over the next few months, targeting middle management, and that 5,000 other roles would remain unfilled.
Meta had suffered a rough 2022 amid a souring economic climate, which forced advertisers to cut back on marketing, and Apple's data privacy changes, which have reduced leeway for ad personalization.
