Zuckerberg has “finished” with Alexandr Wang, worth US$14 billion
JAKARTA – Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has quietly begun dismantling the power structure of Alexandr Wang, the company's highest paid executive.
According to a report by Times of India (04/03/2026), the move signals that Zuckerberg has begun to lose confidence in the 29 year old entrepreneur.
The shift comes just nine months after Wang was hired in a US$14 billion "bet" to lead Meta Superintelligence Labs with full authority over the company's most advanced AI models.
Wang's sidelining reached its peak on Tuesday when Meta announced the creation of a new applied artificial intelligence engineering organisation led by veteran executive Maher Saba.
Saba now reports directly to Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, not to Wang. His new organisation has been deliberately structured with an extremely flat hierarchy up to 50 individual contributors per manager and is tasked with building a “data engine” to accelerate and improve the quality of Meta's AI models.
Through this new team, Zuckerberg has effectively shifted all engineering talent, data pipelines, and model?evaluation functions to operate outside Wang's authority.
Even the Avocado and Mango AI models that Wang had promised will now be built and trained on data infrastructure fully controlled by Saba.
The internal rift stems from a sharp clash of visions. Wang reportedly clashed frequently with Zuckerberg's trusted lieutenants, Chris Cox and Andrew Bosworth.
While Wang insisted on focusing purely on catching up with OpenAI and Google's frontier models, Cox and Bosworth pushed for AI development centred on Instagram and Facebook data to create consumer facing products.
The managerial crisis peaked last November when Meta's Chief AI Scientist, Yann LeCun, walked out after refusing to work under Wang's command.
This parallel restructuring is widely viewed as a form of “soft firing”. Wang retains his title and remains in the glass?walled lab next to Zuckerberg's office, but he has lost all major levers of control.
Wang's isolation mirrors Zuckerberg's long standing pattern of reorganising teams and taking back full control whenever his major bets such as the metaverse or early Llama iterations begin to falter. (SF/LM)
https://www.idnfinancials.com/news/61918/zuckerberg-has-finished-with-alexandr-wang-worth-us14-billion
