ClickUp just cut 290 people — 22% of the company — and the CEO announced it on X like he was shipping a feature. Zeb Evans calls the new structure a “100x org”: roughly 3,000 internal AI agents that now outnumber his remaining humans three to one. The money saved by firing nearly a quarter of the staff doesn’t go back to customers or get banked for a rainy day. It goes to the people who survived the cut, in the form of salary bands that climb to a million dollars a year in cash. Get laid off, or get rich. Those are the two outcomes he’s offering, and he wants applause for both.
The million-dollar bands are the whole trick. You don’t dangle a lottery ticket in front of the people who are left unless you need them too dazzled to count the empty desks. “100x impact” is a polite number that means you, personally, now do the work of the coworkers he let go — except your reward is a maybe, and theirs was a severance check. He’s reportedly so far into this that staff have to talk to an AI agent trained to imitate him before they’re allowed to reach the actual man. He fired the people, kept the bots, and started charging the bots rent on his attention.
This is the move every CEO is running this year, and an MIT labor economist put it plainly last week: they’ve been blaming “the future of work” for layoffs for twenty years. The names change — offshoring then, agents now — and the press release stays the same. Strip the language away and you get fewer people doing the work of many, scared of the next round, while one guy at the top calls the bloodletting a productivity breakthrough. The agents don’t have a mortgage. They won’t get sick, won’t unionize, won’t ask for the raise he’s promising the survivors. That’s the part he actually likes. The million dollars is bait. The 290 people were the point.