After pummelling his opponent in a bout sponsored by Truth Social on the White House South Lawn last Sunday, UFC fighter Josh Hokut extolled President Donald Trump for "having the balls to put some shit like this on."

Over 4,000 people watched Hokut and 13 others duke it out at UFC Freedom 250, a $60 million production celebrating America's 250th anniversary and Donald Trump's 80th birthday. Onlookers sat under the Claw, a 92-foot-tall, 600-ton steel arch and encircled the octagon festooned with logos for the event's sponsors: Monster Energy, Meta, Starlink, Polymarket, and the Saudi entertainment festival Riyadh Season. (After a few rounds of fights, the signage for munitions manufacturer Anduril Industries was appropriately splattered with blood.)

Seated closest to the action was the first family and Trump's nearest and dearest — donors who had given at least $1 million; David Ellison, whose Paramount+ streamed the fight exclusively; and technocrats such as Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Military servicemembers helped fill the stands, too, though troops on TV "MUST MEET CURRENT WAIST-HEIGHT RATIO," according to a memo reported by the Washington Post. The administration's message: only those sufficiently jacked can attend the state-sponsored cage match.

The White House touted the fight, originally scheduled for July 4, as "one of the greatest and most historic sporting events in history." It was a semiotician's fever dream — a branded, chest-thumping caricature of American carnage, carnivalism, and capitalism. For some fighters, paid in stablecoins from Trump family-backed World Liberty Financial, and for fans, paid in jumbotron bloodshed and Bud Light-backed brotherhood, there was also an American berserk form of catharsis.

"There's only one person more incredible than the Incredible Hok, and that's my lord and savior Jesus Christ," Hokut continued in his victory speech. Then he said he was going to have sex with another fighter's mom. "Lastly, Michelle Obama is a man."

A few hundred yards away on the Ellipse, along with 85,000 gathered for the Fan Fest watch party, I couldn't hear Hokut's last line ("Am I right, America?") over the cheers.

By then, the crowd had been reveling in the humidity and the José Cuervo for more than seven hours.

They paraded in at 3:00 p.m., wearing Uncle Sam hats, rhinestoned minidresses, and t-shirts sporting their favorite fighters and slogans like "I'm Voting for a Convicted Criminal," "I'm Just Here for the Wieners," and "I ❤️ Hot Moms."

Men — many of whom were shirtless, as if they were ready to spinkick anyone who cut them in the energy drink line — outnumbered women at least five to one. One standing by the Boy Scouts Memorial fountain bit into a dumpling and smiled as pork juice squirted onto his chest. "Freedom!" he said. Some did pushups on the lawn to get a pump before posing for a picture at the Total Wireless Weigh-In fan experience. (At the actual weigh-in on Saturday, Hokut appeared to vomit on himself.)

Among those going pecs out for the president was Gaige Dengler, a 22-year-old Chipotle worker from Maryland, who took up mixed martial arts a few years ago to work through his anger. "Therapy wasn't really working," he said.

"I'm punching these dudes super hard in the face. I'm getting punched hard in the face. And afterward, they hug me, and they're like, 'Dude, good job.' It's the most supported and respected I've ever felt."

Dengler, who brought his uncle along on Sunday, he said, was seeking the same kind of camaraderie on the South Lawn. "It's a great opportunity for America to kind of unify again. It's kind of like a renewal for America."

Tommy Bui, a 28-year-old who works in hospitality and who was dressed in a black suit with a gold koi fish brooch affixed to his lapel, told me at the Topps trading card booth that he has lost $200,000 to "predatory" sportsbetting apps and casino games over the last few years. Bui wagered $1,000 on the White House fights. When I met Bui, he was chatting with Benjamin Tran, 27, who had recently sworn off betting apps because he wants to have a family soon.

Nearby, a US Navy mechanic from Kentucky told me he was there for "beer, girls, and the White House."

There were plenty of all three and much more to find sprawled across the Ellipse's 50 acres. For much of the afternoon, Fan Fest was a testament to Americans' insatiable capacity to stand in line — to ride the Nothing Stops Ram mechanical bull; to listen to a Ram Truck rev its engine really loudly; to create fighter characters at the Meta booth; to relieve oneself in the Crypto.com Ram Trucks porta-potty village; to take selfies with the Budweiser Clydesdales or models donning Monster Energy sports bras; to test one's fighting strength at the Bud Light Power Punch, or the Exodus UFC Striking Challenge, or Nitro Circus Power Slap.

I took a few minutes to cool off at the one attraction I managed to find with no line, the Budweiser History Museum. I was dizzy and discombobulated by the uncanny slurry of tech conference, NASCAR tailgate, Trump rally, West Village pop-up shop, prayer circle, and backyard barbecue. Thousands of others seemed to feel the same, lying on the grass, napping, or checking their phones as they waited for night to fall.

The jumbotrons played several AI-generated ads that reminded us that "America is winning" and that we're pioneering patriots at a world-historic event. One compared the night's fighters to the soldiers who'd stormed Normandy, the men and women who'd marched on Selma, and the firefighters who entered the Twin Towers on 9/11. (Earlier in the week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio likened the cage match to the moon landing.) The Army's Down Range band performed covers of "Welcome to the Jungle" and "Man, I Feel Like a Woman." There was a live taping of Logan Paul's podcast. At one point, Paul's cohost Mike Majlak announced, "If you got a small dick, you're smart. We've got some smart motherfuckers out there in the crowd."

Night fell, people took their seats on the lawn, and the broadcast began. Trump and UFC CEO Dana White walked out of the Oval Office and down the aisle to their seats, a fitting start to the culmination of the president and the league's yearslong courtship. Then fighters delivered knockout after knockout until 1:00 a.m., giving each other black eyes and concussions and taking questions from Joe Rogan in the Monster Strawberry Lemonade Unleash the Beast post-bout Q&As. The crowd hooted at hooks and screamed for more every time someone was thrown onto the floor. When the night was still young, and the gnats weren't yet dancing in the klieg lights, a young man, wearing American flag shorteralls and clutching a beer snake as long as George Washington's scabbard as he crossed the Delaware, took in the scene and offered his friends a benediction. "I ain't no snitch,' he said, "but Blake just shat his pants."

"What this fight is really all about, and why we're doing it at the White House, is it's the 250th birthday of America," White told The Hollywood Reporter before the event. "From the first fight of the night until the main event, we will tell the story of America." The story that UFC Freedom 250 ultimately told was a synecdoche of Donald Trump's America, where excess is branded as excellence, where the bag is up for grabs if you bend the knee, where everything from redwood forest fires to wars and annexations across the gulf stream waters can be bet on, where there is nothing the country won't do for a good episode of TV.

Zak Jason is the executive editor of Business Insider's Discourse team.

• Mark Zuckerberg's email struck an empathetic tone. He also said he didn't expect more companywide layoffs in 2026.
• Layoff anxiety can hurt worker productivity and morale, thereby carrying a real business cost.
• Workplace observers say his focus on stability suggests he recognizes the impact of prolonged uncertainty.

Mark Zuckerberg is signaling that Meta employees can stop looking over their shoulders.

After long emphasizing cost-cutting, management flattening, and "Year of Efficiency" rhetoric, the Meta chief struck an empathetic tone in his post-layoff email to employees on Wednesday — emphasizing stability, conceding communication failures, and promising to "do right by people along the way."

In his internal email to staffers, he thanked the roughly 8,000 workers who were being let go and emphasized his desire to provide "as much stability as possible" to those who remained.

It was a reminder that layoff anxiety carries a real business cost.

To that point, Zuckerberg said that he doesn't expect further companywide layoffs in 2026.

While that doesn't rule out smaller-scale cuts, the message followed weeks of grueling uncertainty for staffers waiting to learn whether they still had jobs.

Zuckerberg's email — a shift away from the more hard-charging tone he adopted post-pandemic — suggested he recognizes that prolonged uncertainty can weigh on employees and, ultimately, the company itself, workplace observers told Business Insider.

"You do need to try to create some psychological safety for people who are there, because layoffs are extremely distracting," said Amii Barnard-Bahn, a C-suite coach and consultant.

'We won't always get this balance right'

Wednesday's cuts were the latest challenge for a workforce that has spent years navigating repeated rounds of layoffs, heightened performance scrutiny, and persistent questions about whether AI would take their jobs.

It's a theme that has played out across tech, as companies increasingly tie cuts to AI and leaders warn about a white-collar bloodbath.

In 2025, the CEO told staffers in an all-hands meeting to "buckle up" for an "intense" year ahead. Some of Meta's layoffs have come with an added sting: Last year, the company also said it was cutting some 4,000 workers who had failed to meet expectations.

By the time the latest round arrived, the accumulation of uncertainty had drained some employees and left them wishing they were let go.

Meta didn't respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Zuckerberg's Wednesday message hit on the toll that uncertainty around staffing levels can take: "We won't always get this balance right, but I care deeply about this so we'll keep adjusting and work hard to do right by people along the way," he wrote.

It's not clear how effective Zuckerberg's softer tone might be, though he had little choice but to try to reassure those left standing, said Pav Stojkovic, an HR consultant and former chief people officer at several companies, including The Athletic.

Zuckerberg's approach is a departure from one he'd used previously. In 2022, for example, Zuckerberg told Meta staff he was upping performance goals to get rid of employees who "shouldn't be here."

By "turning up the heat a little bit," Zuckerberg said at the time that he hoped some workers would "decide that this place isn't for you, and that self-selection is OK with me."

Last year, Meta directed managers to place a higher proportion of employees in its bottom review rankings. Zuckerberg has a long-standing history of ratcheting up the pressure at Meta, reinforcing a blunt, survival-of-the-fittest culture at the social media giant.

The billionaire CEO is far from alone in embracing a sink-or-swim philosophy as AI reshapes the workplace.

A focus on execution

Zuckerberg's note comes at a transitional time for the industry. Excitement over the possibility of AI has mixed with fears over efficiency-driven job cuts and the encroachment of automation on workers' livelihoods.

As Meta reshuffles roughly 7,000 employees to focus on new AI initiatives, Zuckerberg needs a workforce concentrated on execution amid the AI arms race.

"Success isn't a given. AI is the most consequential technology of our lifetimes. The companies that lead the way will define the next generation," he wrote.

Barnard-Bahn said it's likely that productivity at the company took a big hit in the last month, as workers worried about whether they or their colleagues would be cut or reorganized.

By providing workers with a higher degree of job security for the next six-plus months, Zuckerberg might be offering employees something that Big Tech competitors have not.

"Meta has the talent, the infrastructure, the apps and distribution, and the business model," Zuckerberg wrote. "We have a lot of work ahead, but what's on the other side is going to be extraordinary."

• Meta has set goals for some employees on how much they should use AI.
• They include targets for using AI code assistants, agents, and other tools.
• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he wants the company to be "AI-native."

Mark Zuckerberg wants Meta to be "AI-native." An internal document shows one way the company's CEO plans to get there.

The company has set goals for how much some employees should use AI tools for tasks such as coding.

Meta employees created a document to collect information about these goals from across different organizations, according to a copy seen by Business Insider. It includes goals set late last year and for 2026.

Tech companies are using various methods to motivate staff to use AI, such as tying AI use to performance reviews and gamifying AI use with competitive leaderboards.

The document states that Meta's creation org, which is responsible for building and maintaining core creative experiences, set a goal for the first half of 2026 that 65% of engineers are expected to write more than 75% of their committed code using AI. Committed code is code that has been saved and tracked in a project.

Meta's Scalable Machine Learning org, which focuses on AI models and infrastructure, had a goal for February 2026 to achieve 50% to 80% AI-assisted code, the document said. It cited a comment alongside this goal from a senior engineering manager that said: "We are not tracking this via metrics."

The document also listed several companywide goals for Q4 2025 for central products — a horizontal org spanning Messenger, WhatsApp, Facebook, and other major products. One target is for 80% of mid to senior-level engineers to adopt AI tools such as DevMate, Metamate, and Google's Gemini, with a note that the focus is on "tool adoption" rather than the percentage of code written by AI.

It said that 55% of code changes from software engineers across the central product orgs should be "Agent-Assisted."

It is not clear whether the goals listed in the document are tied to performance reviews.

"It's well-known that this is a priority and we're focused on using AI to help employees with their day-to-day work," a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider. They said that Meta's performance program is focused on rewarding impact from AI tools, not just usage.

Here's a breakdown of Meta's goals in the memo:

• Companywide Q4 2025 Goals (Central Products)

  • 55% of software engineers' code changes should be agent-assisted.
  • 80% of mid to senior-level engineers should adopt general AI tools.

• Scalable ML Team Goal (Feb 2026)

  • Target: 50% to 80% AI-assisted code.

• Creation Org H1 2026

  • 65% of engineers should write more than 75% of their committed code using AI.

(Note: Some technical terms have been rephrased for clarity)

Mark Zuckerberg's AI odyssey

Zuckerberg is aggressively trying to make Meta what he has called an "AI-native" company. Meta has started tying employee performance to their AI usage, Business Insider reported last year, and staff are using Meta's internal AI bot to write reviews for their peers.

More recently, the company rebranded some employees within a division of Reality Labs with one of three titles: "AI Builder," "AI Pod Lead," or "AI Org Lead."

The change comes as Meta is adopting smaller teams and moving toward a flatter organizational structure.

"Our ultimate goal is to drive a step change in engineering productivity and product quality," read a memo about the changes, which was reviewed by Business Insider. "To achieve this, we're fundamentally rewiring how we operate, how we are structured, and how we support each other."

Andrew Bosworth, Meta's CTO, told staff on Tuesday that he would take charge of Meta's "AI for Work" initiative, which is designed to boost the company's internal adoption of AI tools, according to a memo reviewed by Business Insider and first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Meta laid off several hundred employees across Reality Labs and other orgs this week.

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• It's easy to dunk on Mark Zuckerberg and Meta for burning $80 billion on the metaverse and then moving on.
• But that's not exactly true.
• What is true is that Zuckerberg used to spend a lot of time talking about the metaverse. Now he talks about AI instead.

Nearly five years ago, Mark Zuckerberg told us the future was the metaverse — an idea that seemed to involve all of us strapping on virtual reality goggles and interacting with digital versions of ourselves.

Now, reports say Zuckerberg's Meta is bailing on the metaverse after losing more than $80 billion on the project.

This is a fun story for people who like stories about Big Tech tripping on itself.

But it's not really true.

Start with the $80 billion that publications like The New York Times and others say Zuckerberg has lost chasing the metaverse. Meta has indeed generated losses of at least $80 billion via its Reality Labs unit, which lost more than $19 billion in 2025 alone.

But Reality Labs is not going away. That's because Reality Labs makes lots of things beyond Horizon Worlds, the virtual reality space Zuckerberg told us that we would work and play in, but that almost no one actually visited.

Reality Labs also develops all the hardware Meta has been selling over the years, including its Quest virtual reality goggles, and its Ray-Ban AI glasses, which seem to have at least some consumer uptake (whether that's good for the world is a different issue).

At some point in the next couple years, Meta will roll out yet another set of glasses, purportedly designed to let you stream movies at home. (These are the same glasses Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos recently said director James Cameron can't stop talking about.)

It's entirely possible that all of Meta's device efforts will amount to very little. Efforts to get anyone but gamers to buy virtual reality headsets really haven't panned out, and while Meta, Apple, and others are now racing to bring the same tech to lightweight glasses, we have no idea if these things will ever be more than a novelty.

But for now, Meta is still plugging away at this stuff. Which means Reality Labs will continue to generate billions of dollars in losses this year and beyond.

OK. What about the idea that Meta is no longer interested in the metaverse — a notion Zuckerberg said was so important that he re-named his company after it?

That's a little trickier to assess. Meta is quite prickly about the notion that it's bailing on the metaverse: Its argument is that the metaverse doesn't have to involve headsets, and that you could do all kinds of metaverse-y things on your phone — or maybe your phone paired with some new glasses.

That's what Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth is getting at with this tweet he put out this week (and which Meta comms directed me to when I asked them for comment for this story):

Could be! But it's also true that Zuckerberg's public interest in the metaverse seems to have dramatically tapered off since 2021, when he told us the future was all about living in virtual space. (Zuckerberg had very different hair back then, too.)

Now, of course, Zuckerberg spends most of his time talking about AI, and Meta's ambitions to build "superintelligence." Which is why he's spending gazillions on AI talent and datacenters.

It's possible that all of those efforts get replaced by something else, too. Everyone in tech swears that the current AI boom really is a world-reshaping moment, and maybe it will be. But if you're still wondering what happened to all those NFTs you bought in 2021, I'll forgive you if you're going to remain in a wait-and-see on this one.

There is another way to think about Meta's interest in both the metaverse and AI. They're both shiny new things that offer Zuckerberg the promise of something he's wanted for a very long time: a way to run a business without having to rely on Google or Apple as his intermediaries.

Right now, Meta reaches people through phones and operating systems it doesn't control. At peak metaverse hype, Zuckerberg was clearly hoping to replace the iPhone with devices of his own. And in an AI-first world, it's possible the phone matters a lot less — or gets displaced by a new set of devices and interfaces.

That doesn't mean AI is just the metaverse with a new label. But it does suggest the through line here isn't the technology. It's Zuckerberg's recurring search for a platform he owns.