An employee laid off by Meta says he got a strange package from the company marked 'leaver' with two emojis inside and no note

Story by jhart@insider.com (Jordan Hart) • Yesterday 

Matt Motyl/Twitter

One former Meta employee received a 'peculiar' gift in the mail just in time for the holidays.

Matt Motyl says he was one of the 11,000 staff members laid off by Meta in November.
Motyl says other ex-employees DM'ed him saying they'd received odd packages from the company too.

A former Meta employee said he received a bizarre package from his old company labeled "leaver" one month after being laid off from the tech giant.

Researcher Matt Motyl was laid off from Meta in November despite exceeding expectations in performance reviews, he said. In December, the company sent him a box without a note containing two rubber cards displaying emojis — one "wow" face and one "sad" face — with cords attached.

Although Motyl assumed they were Christmas tree ornaments, commenters said the rubber faces could be luggage tags. But their true purpose is unclear since the only context for the package was the word "leaver" written on the box, Motyl said.

"Either way, it's still a confusing thing to receive from a company after they lay you off during the holiday season," Motyl tweeted.

Some questioned the validity of the package and suggested pranksters could be responsible, but Motyl confirmed that it came from Meta's office with his employee ID number written on the box.

A week later, Motyl said he received four large boxes from Meta so that he could return the Quest 1 virtual reality headset and controller he'd received from the company.

In November, Meta announced that the company would be laying off more than 11,000 employees followed by an apology from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Insider previously reported.

In the thread of tweets related to the box, which Motyl called "peculiar," he said he'd heard from other former Meta employees about strange things delivered to them from the company.

"Some folks have DMed me saying that they also received random things. 1 person said he received a box of several open bourbon bottles that he recalled seeing near his desk before the layoffs," Motyl wrote.

Meta shed more light on the matter in a statement to Insider.

"On background, we packed and shipped items left on impacted employees' desks. These items were shipped to him on the assumption that they were his personal items," it read.