All is not well between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Meta's highest-paid employee as the company's new reporting structure shows

Meta's newest reporting structure is exposing something leadership has tried to hide—friction between CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his highest-paid employee, Alexandr Wang. Multiple sources close to the company reveal that Wang, the 28-year-old founder Zuckerberg recruited for $14 billion, finds the CEO's hands-on management suffocating.

At the same time, current staff question whether Wang has the chops to lead Meta's $600 billion AI bet.The tension surfaced this fall during a crucial meeting. Wang's TBD Lab team and longtime executives Chris Cox and Andrew Bosworth clashed over strategy. Cox and Bosworth wanted Wang's new AI model trained on Instagram and Facebook data to boost the company's core advertising business. Wang pushed back hard. He argued the goal should be catching up to OpenAI and Google's models first, worrying that customizing training for product tasks would slow progress.It's an us-versus-them mentality that's become impossible to ignore inside Meta. Wang's researchers view the old guard as mere product managers stuck in the social media era. They're chasing superintelligence while everyone else cares about feeds and ads. Some staff even questioned whether $2 billion was quietly shifted from Bosworth's Reality Labs budget to Wang's team—though Meta's spokesperson denied the figure, the whispers persist.

Wang's inexperience becomes liability as AI race intensifies

The cracks widened when Yann LeCun, Meta's legendary AI scientist and a Turing Award winner, bolted in November rather than report to Wang. Sources say LeCun bristled at serving under someone whose background was data labeling, not cutting-edge AI research. Before that, Nat Friedman, another big hire, faced pressure to move faster. The rushed launch of Vibes, Meta's AI video feed, frustrated his team who felt forced to compete with OpenAI's Sora before they were ready.Wang told associates that Zuckerberg's micromanagement feels suffocating. Yet here's the irony—Zuckerberg hired him specifically because he needed someone he could control, someone young and ambitious enough to execute his vision of "personal superintelligence." The CEO's reputation for obsessing over chosen projects means TBD Lab gets his undivided attention. That laser focus looks less like support and more like surveillance.

Meta reorganizes infrastructure chain of command above Wang

This week, Zuckerberg announced Meta Compute, a new top-level initiative reporting directly to him. He's putting Santosh Janardhan and Daniel Gross in charge, with Dina Powell McCormick handling government relations. The move effectively centralizes infrastructure decisions above Wang, suggesting Zuckerberg wants tighter control as Meta burns through billions. If Wang thought he had autonomy, this announcement proved otherwise.

Meta's trajectory suggests Zuckerberg's betting everything on AI—and he's not delegating that to a 28-year-old anymore.