Meta announces end of DEI programs. Read the internal memo
Meta on Friday told employees that its plans to end a number of internal programs designed to increase the company’s hiring of diverse candidates, the latest dramatic change ahead of President-elect Donald Trump‘s second White House term.
Janelle Gale, Meta’s vice president of people, made the announcement on the company’s Workplace internal communications forum.
Among the changes, Meta is ending the company’s “Diverse Slate Approach” of considering qualified candidates from underrepresented groups for its open roles. The company is also putting an end to its diversity supplier program and its equity and inclusion training programs.
Gale also announced the disbanding of the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, team, and she said that Meta Chief Diversity Officer Maxine Williams will move into a new role focused on accessibility and engagement.
Several Meta employees responded to Gale’s post with comments criticizing the new policy.
“If you don’t stand by your principles when things get difficult, they aren’t values. They’re hobbies,” one employee posted in a comment that got reaction from more than 600 colleagues.
The DEI policy change follows a number of sweeping policy reversals by the social media company this month. Last week, Meta replaced global affairs head Nick Clegg with Joel Kaplan, a veteran at the company with longstanding ties to the Republican Party. On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg announced a new speech policy that included bringing an end to the company’s third-party fact-checking program.
Axios was first to report the DEI changes at the social media company. Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Below is Gale’s full internal memo, which CNBC obtained.
Hi all,
I wanted to share some changes we’re making to our hiring, development, and procurement practices. Before getting into details, there is some important background to lay out:
The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing. The Supreme Court of the United States has recently made decisions signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI. It reaffirms long standing principles that discrimination should not be tolerated or promoted on the basis of inherent characteristics. The term “DEI” has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.
At Meta, we have a principle of serving everyone. This can be achieved through cognitively diverse teams, with differences in knowledge, skills, political views, backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences. Such teams are better at innovating, solving complex problems and identifying new opportunities which ultimately helps us deliver on our ambition to build products that serve everyone. On top of that, we’ve always believed that no one should be given — or deprived — of opportunities because of protective characteristics, and that has not changed.
Given the shifting legal and policy landscape, we’re making the following changes:
- On hiring, we will continue to source candidates from different backgrounds, but we will stop using the Diverse Slate Approach. This practice has always been subject to public debate and is currently being challenged. We believe there are other ways to build an industry leading workforce and leverage teams made up of world-class people from all types of backgrounds to build products that work for everyone.
- We previously ended representation goals for women and ethnic minorities. Having goals can create the impression that decisions are being made based on race or gender. While this has never been our practice, we want to eliminate any impression of it.
- We are sunsetting our supplier diversity effort within our broader supplier strategy. This effort focused on sourcing from diverse-owned businesses; going forward, we will focus our efforts on supporting small and medium sized businesses that power much of our economy. Opportunities will continue to be available to all qualified suppliers, including those who are part of the supplier diversity program.
- Instead of equity and inclusion training programs, we will build programs that focus on how to apply fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for all, no matter your background.
- We will no longer have a team focused on DEI. Maxine Williams is taking on a new role at Meta focused on accessibility and engagement.
What remains the same are the principles we’ve used to guide our People Practices:
- We serve everyone. We are committed to making our products accessible, beneficial and universally impactful for everyone.
- We build the best teams with the most talented people. This means sourcing people from a range of candidate pools but never making hiring decisions based on protected characteristics, (e.g., race, gender, etc.). We will always evaluate people as individuals.
- We drive consistency in employment practices to ensure fairness and objectivity for all. We do not provide preferential treatment, extra opportunities or unjustified credit to anyone based on protected characteristics. Nor will we devalue impact based on these characteristics.
- We build connection and community. We support our employee communities, people who use our products and those in the communities. We operate our employee community groups (MRGs) continue to be open to all.
Meta has the privilege to serve billions of people every day. It is important to us that our products are accessible to all, and useful in promoting economic growth and opportunity around the world. We continue to be focused on serving everyone and building a multi-talented, industry-leading workforce from all walks of life.
WATCH: Meta is returning to free speech tradition, says Facebook’s former chief privacy officer Chris Kelly
Michael Intrator, Founder & CEO of CoreWeave, Inc., Nvidia-backed cloud services provider, gestures during the company’s IPO at the Nasdaq Market, in New York City, U.S., March 28, 2025.
Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters
Artificial intelligence cloud provider CoreWeave is set to make its Nasdaq debut on Friday. The company priced shares at $40 in its initial public offering on Thursday, raising $1.5 billion.
As a supplier to OpenAI, CoreWeave is among the beneficiaries of the rise of generative AI software such as the San Francisco AI startup’s ChatGPT assistant, which launched in late 2022.
Microsoft provided cloud services to OpenAI but quickly called in CoreWeave, which rents out access to its hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphics processing units, to provide additional capacity. In 2024, 62% of CoreWeave’s $1.92 billion in revenue came from Microsoft.
But Microsoft is also a competitor, as are Amazon, Google and Oracle.
Few technology companies have joined stock exchanges since late 2021, when investors became more cautious about inflation, leading central banks to raise interest rates. That in turn made unprofitable companies less attractive.
There were been just 13 venture-backed technology IPOs in 2022, 2023 and 2024, compared with 77 in 2021, according to data from Jay Ritter, an emeritus professor of finance at the University of Florida.
CoreWeave reported a $863 million net loss in 2024, but it was in growth mode, with revenue growing 737% year over year. It had raised almost $13 billion in debt as of Dec. 31, with much of that allocated for GPUs that go inside the company’s leased data centers in the U.S. and abroad.
The technology industry can now boast the largest U.S. IPO since automation software maker UiPath‘s $1.57 billion New York Stock Exchange debut in 2021. Still, CoreWeave downsized its offering to 37.5 million shares from 49 million and priced below the initial range of $47 to $55 each.
Since CoreWeave filed its prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 3, digital physical therapy company Hinge Health and Swedish online lender Klarna have done the same. Discord, which runs popular chat software, has hired banks for an IPO, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.
CoreWeave’s arrival on Nasdaq might inspire other AI companies to go public, too. An “AI parade” might be on the way, Mark Klein, CEO of SuRo Capital, which invests in private companies, told CNBC earlier.
Data analytics company Databricks, which partly generates revenue by running AI models on behalf of clients, announced a funding round at a $62 billion valuation in December. OpenAI, for its part, was in talks to raise money at a $340 billion valuation as of January.
CoreWeave was founded in 2017 and is based in Livingston, New Jersey, with 881 employees at the end of 2024. Before CoreWeave’s IPO, Michael Intrator, the company’s co-founder and CEO, controlled 38% of its voting power, while Nvidia held 1%. Other investors include Fidelity and Magnetar.
WATCH: The slowdown of the AI buzzword momentum trade will hurt CoreWeave, says NYU’s Aswath Damodaran
CoreWeave CEO Mike Intrator said Friday that the company’s IPO pricing, which came in below expectations, has to be placed in the larger context of the macroenvironment.
“There’s a lot of headwinds in the macro,” Intrator said on CNBC’s Squawk Box. “And we definitely had to scale or rightsize the transaction for where the buying interest was.”
The company, which provides access to Nvidia graphics processing units for artificial intelligence training and workloads, priced its IPO at $40 a share, below the initial $47 to $55 per share filing. The stock will begin trading on the Nasdaq under the symbol “CRWV.”
The lower price provided enough of a discount to the replacement value that investors could feel comfortable buying, sources familiar with the offering told CNBC’s Leslie Picker. Replacement value is the value of the company’s assets at the present time.
About 10-15 long-only and strategic investors made up the majority of the backing group, the sources said.
“We believe that as the public markets get to know us, get to know how we execute, get to know how we build our infrastructure, get to know how we build our client relationships and the incredible capacity of our solutions, the company will be very successful,” Intrator said.
Nvidia is anchoring the deal with a $250 million order, CNBC reported Thursday.
CoreWeave raised $1.5 billion at the $40 per share price, giving it a non-diluted valuation of around $19 billion.
Intrator said the company will use the money to pay down debt and for expansion.
The company held nearly $8 billion in debt at the end of 2024.
CoreWeave was also bolstered by the recent market action triggered by DeepSeek, which pushed the company to “build bigger” and “build faster,” Intrator said.
“One of the things that’s made us incredibly effective is we take a really long-term view of where this space is going,” he said.
“Our customers are telling us, universally, to continue to build – we cannot keep up with the scale.”
Intrator also addressed administrative issues with a loan last year in which the company faced technical defaults.
The company started to use money from the $7.6 billion loan for scaling in Europe, The Financial Times reported.
Intrator said the company self-reported the “misstep” in its S-1 and quickly addressed it with the lenders.
“Those lenders proceeded to go ahead and continue to lend us hundreds of millions of dollars after all of these issues,” he said.
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