Mark Zuckerberg's giant middle finger to Wall Street backfired for Meta. Welcome to the 'biggest two week pivot' analysts have ever seen.

• Analysts at Jefferies called Meta's moves a "Zuck U Turn."
• Beyond layoffs, Meta is cutting many other costs across the company.

About two weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg raised a giant middle finger to investors who were clamoring for cost-cuts. The move went stunningly wrong, crushing the shares of Facebook parent company Meta.

The young billionaire founder didn't take very long to learn his lesson. On Wednesday, Zuckerberg announced 11,000 layoffs, about 13% of the company's staff. While that should save Meta billions of dollars, it was expected as Insider's Kali Hays has been reporting for months that major job cuts were coming.

What really surprised Wall Street were the other steps Zuckerberg is taking:

• Meta extended its hiring freeze through the first quarter of 2023.
• Zuckerberg now plans to add fewer employees next year.
• The company lowered its 2023 expense guidance by $2 billion, a change that came after only two weeks of issuing the previous higher forecast.
• It also reined in the high-end of its capital expenditure plans, loping off another $2 billion there.

Analysts at Jefferies called it a "Zuck U Turn" and said the job cuts will boost profits while not impacting Meta's growth trajectory.

"Meta and Zuckerberg heard loud and clear the massively negative investor reaction to perceived lack of cost discipline," Mark Mahaney, an internet analyst at ISI Evercore, wrote in a note to investors on Wednesday.

Mahaney has been a top tech sector analyst for over a decade and went through the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009. So he's seen his fair share of collapses and about-turns. This one by Zuckerberg ranks at or near the top, with the analyst calling it "the biggest two week pivot we've ever seen."

For Zuckerberg, Meta and even Silicon Valley, this is another sign that the eras of abundance and founder-friendly investing are ending.

Zuckerberg was the poster-child for the concept of the mercurial tech founder who made decisions quickly and broke things, but created massive wealth for venture capitalists and Wall Street for many years. Few investors questioned his calls until Meta shares started plummeting in the past year, wiping out almost $1 trillion in market value.

Meta is now worth about $250 billion, less than Home Depot, a seller of wrenches and flower pots. Apple is worth more than 8 times Zuckerberg's company.

With this new more modest status, Meta is becoming more frugal. Instead of more fancy offices for coddled tech workers, the company said it is shrinking its real estate footprint. It's even forcing some employees to share desks. Perks have been dialed back, too, and more cost-cutting changes like this are coming soon, according to Wednesday's announcement.

"This will add up to a meaningful cultural shift in how we operate," Zuckerberg told his remaining employees.

For Wall Street, this all came about two weeks too late. But better late than never.

"Cultural shifts are hard - era of free $$ created bad culture," Brad Gerstner, a major Meta shareholder at Altimeter Capital, tweeted on Wednesday, while also calling the moves "an important first step" by Zuckerberg and Meta's board of directors.

Are you a Meta employee, or someone else with insight to share? Got a tip? Contact Kali Hays khays@insider.com, on secure messaging app Signal at 949-280-0267, or through Twitter DM at @hayskali. Reach out using a non-work device.