Mark Zuckerberg raged at employees over news report, ordered them to resign, leaked email shows
Zuckerberg titled the staff-wide Facebook email 'Please Resign'
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Billionaire Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg once raged at his employees after one of them allegedly leaked internal Facebook plans to a news outlet, according to a newly leaked email.
The email, sent Sept. 22, 2010, had the subject line "Please Resign" and was addressed to all of Facebook's staff. It came just days after TechCrunch published a story claiming that Facebook was "secretly building a phone."
Zuckerberg, who was 25 at the time, started the email with a warning: "Confidential—Do Not Share."
"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 on Friday about what we're actually doing—building ways to make all phones and apps more social," Zuckerberg wrote.
"It is frustrating and destructive that anyone here thought is [sic] was okay to say this to anyone outside the company. This was an act of betrayal. The fact that the story was inaccurate doesn't make it any better. I've had to personally spend a lot of time over the last few days—as have a lot of other people—cleaning up the damage from this mess," he continued.
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Mark Zuckerberg sent an enraged message to Facebook employees in 2010, a newly leaked email shows. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images / Getty Images)
Zuckerberg sent an enraged email to staff back before Facebook gave birth to Meta. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez, File / AP Newsroom)
Zuckerberg then addressed the leaker directly, although he did not yet know who it was at the time.
"So I'm asking whoever leaked this to resign immediately. 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," he wrote.
The tech mogul went on to say all employees should operate under the assumption that everything they do is confidential. He warned that if they couldn't handle that then they should "just leave."
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The email's leak came thanks to the "Internal Tech Emails" Twitter account, which has a long history of unearthing communications from inside the world's largest tech companies.
Zuckerberg has fired thousands of employees from his new company, Meta, in recent months. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images / Getty Images)
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Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox Business.
Zuckerberg has fired thousands of employees from his new company, Meta, in recent months.