News / ai
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1 min read
Record Profits. Fire the Measurers.
Read more . . . →Cloudflare posted record revenue last quarter — $639.8 million, up 34%, best quarter in the company’s 16-year history — then fired 1,100 people. Twenty percent of the company, out. CEO Matthew Prince needed a word for these people, so he invented one: “measurers.” Accountants, auditors, middle managers, legal. The people who make sure the company doesn’t eat itself from the inside. Gone. Prince and his co-founder insisted this wasn’t a cost-cutting exercise. It was the “agentic AI era.” They released a statement so thick with future-speak it barely registers as English. The stock dropped 24% after the announcement — Wall...
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1 min read
Fired on a Promise
Read more . . . →A Harvard Business Review survey of over 1,000 executives found something that should probably be front-page news: companies aren’t laying off workers because AI replaced them. They’re laying off workers because AI might replace them someday. That’s the deal now. You didn’t lose your job to a machine — you lost it to a PowerPoint slide about a machine. 113,863 workers in tech and adjacent industries are out in 2026 so far. 819 a day. Meanwhile CFOs are privately admitting AI layoffs will run 9x higher than what they’re telling the public. The productivity gains they promised haven’t materialized —...
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1 min read
PayPal Fired 20% of Its Staff and Called It a Tech Comeback
Read more . . . →PayPal’s new CEO walked in the door in March, fired 20% of the staff, and announced the company is “becoming a technology company again.” As opposed to what? The 23,800 people who showed up every day and ran one of the world’s biggest payment networks — what were they operating, a nail salon? The framing is built to make you forget there are people in the number. 4,760 of them. When a new CEO says the company is “becoming” something it used to be, the implication is that the existing workforce was the problem. That they de-teched it somehow. That...
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1 min read
LinkedIn cuts 900 jobs on a 12% revenue quarter
Read more . . . →LinkedIn had 12% revenue growth last quarter. They also just fired 900 people. The official reason is AI restructuring. The new CPO told employees they want “smaller, faster, more agile teams” that lean harder on AI tools. Translation: business is great, but cutting staff is how you tell investors you’re being futuristic. LinkedIn’s own AI hiring products are already pulling in $450 million a year. That money didn’t go to the people who built them. Harvard Business Review ran the numbers on this wave. Ninety-five percent of companies running AI-driven layoffs are seeing no measurable profit return. Zero. They’re not...
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1 min read
They Fired the Humans. The AI Still Doesn't Pay.
Read more . . . →They had a story about this. AI transformation. The robots would do the work, profits would climb, shareholders would cheer, and the humans — well, the humans would figure it out. It was always a tidier story for the people who write the memos than for the people who receive them. Gartner just studied 350 companies — all over $1B revenue, all running AI tools — and found that the ones cutting the most workers saw no better return than the ones that kept people. Zero correlation. The study dropped May 5. The layoffs kept coming anyway. 38,000 jobs gone...
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1 min read
$725 Billion for AI, Severance for Everyone Else
Read more . . . →Coinbase just fired 700 people — 14% of its staff — and CEO Brian Armstrong described it as “building an intelligence, with humans around the edge.” Humans around the edge. You’re no longer a worker. You’re a decorative border on a product. Big Tech collectively committed $725 billion to AI this year — Amazon $200B, Microsoft $190B, Meta up to $145B — while burning through 80,000 workers in Q1 alone. Human salaries are the one cost flexible enough to cut fast enough to fund the buildout. Oracle made workers train the AI that replaced them. Not as a metaphor. They...
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1 min read
Zuckerberg Laid Off 8,000 People to Pay for Servers
Read more . . . →The number is $135 billion. That’s Meta’s AI infrastructure spend this year — Zuckerberg just raised the forecast again because apparently $115B wasn’t enough silicon for the guy who already owns your attention span. To cover the difference, he’s cutting 8,000 employees starting May 20, plus cancelling 6,000 open roles. Fourteen thousand positions, gone. Meta posted record profits last quarter. The budget isn’t tight — the priorities are. He told them at a company town hall. To their faces. “The layoffs are a direct consequence of the AI budget.” The company restructures into AI “pods,” which sounds like a sci-fi...
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1 min read
Jack Dorsey Fired 4,000 People and Called It Innovation
Read more . . . →Jack Dorsey laid off 40% of Block’s staff — 4,000 people — and told the world it was because of AI. Said the business was strong, profits were up, growth was good. Just… didn’t need those people anymore. Specifically didn’t need the policy team. Specifically didn’t need DEI. Fascinating which roles the machines replaced first. Here’s the part that should make you furious: he then went on record saying most companies are “late” and will make similar cuts within the year. He turned a mass firing into an industry announcement. A roadmap. Every CEO in America now has their script...
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Oracle Made $6 Billion Last Quarter and Said Thanks by Firing 30,000 People at 6 AM
Read more . . . →Oracle made $6 billion in profit last quarter — a 95% increase — and then fired 30,000 people via email at 6 AM. A mass email signed “Oracle Leadership” that said “today is your last working day.” Thirty thousand people woke up, checked their inbox, and found out they’re unemployed so Larry Ellison can spend $156 billion building AI data centers. The man is worth more than most countries’ GDP and his company just posted its best quarter in years, and the thank-you note to the workforce was a pink slip at dawn. This is the part they don’t say...
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1 min read
Spotify's Fastest-Growing Product Category
Read more . . . →One guy in North Carolina made $8 million streaming this stuff with bots. Spotify’s fix? An opt-in protection tool for real artists. Bold strategy, protecting the people you’re barely paying.
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