News / corporate
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1 min read
Volkswagen Lost China. 100,000 Workers Get the Bill.
Read more . . . →Volkswagen wants to cut up to 100,000 jobs and shut four German plants — the biggest restructuring in the company’s 89-year history, roughly one in seven of everyone who works there. The sites on the chopping block, including Zwickau, Hanover, Emden, and Audi’s factory in Neckarsulm, employ more than 45,000 people between them. And the reason a worker in Emden is about to lose the thing his whole town is built around? Management got beaten in China. BYD and the other homegrown brands ate VW’s lunch, sales in its single biggest market fell 20 percent in one quarter, and the...
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1 min read
Chevron Bought a $53 Billion Company. The Bill Went to 8,000 Workers.
Read more . . . →Chevron is cutting up to 8,000 jobs — a fifth of its people — to save $3 billion. Keep that number in your head, because two months ago the same company closed a $53 billion deal to swallow Hess, and this year it’s shovelling $20 billion into share buybacks, five billion a quarter, like clockwork. So the math was never tight. Chevron has never had more money to move around. It just decided the cheapest place to find three billion dollars was the payroll, and CEO Mike Wirth called it “stronger long-term competitiveness,” which is executive for “you, specifically, are...
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2 min read
They Voided 30,000 People's Stock, Then Handed The New CFO $26 Million Of It
Read more . . . →This spring Oracle fired up to 30,000 people, most of them by early-morning email, and booked something like $2.1 billion in restructuring costs to do it. The number that matters isn’t the headcount, though — it’s the fine print on how they were cut loose. Under Oracle’s severance terms, anyone laid off lost their unvested restricted stock the instant they were terminated. Whatever stock had already vested, you kept, sitting in your Fidelity account. Everything you’d been promised and hadn’t yet crossed the finish line on simply evaporated the moment HR hit send. Workers on Blind and TheLayoff started comparing...
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1 min read
Make Them Sell At A Loss
Read more . . . →There are more than four thousand finished condos sitting empty in Metro Vancouver right now, a 76 percent jump in a single year, in a city where people can’t find a place to live. The buildings are done. The lights are off. Developers put them up as investments, the bet went bad, and now they sit dark while families double up and rents keep climbing. This week Mark Carney and David Eby walked out with the fix: up to $3.2 billion over ten years to slash developer charges in half and convert 2,200 of those empty units into affordable homes....
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1 min read
Ubisoft Kept The Jewels And The Family Name
Read more . . . →Ubisoft just cut another 380 people. The Winnipeg studio is dead after eight years, Belgrade is gone, and the Rainbow Six team in Montreal lost 120 heads in one swing. That’s the sixth round of layoffs in a single calendar year — sixth — and the official reason is a €1.5 billion loss and a cost-cutting plan that runs all the way to 2028. They say it like there’s no money anywhere in the building, like the doors are about to close, like everybody’s just got to understand. Except there was money. Last fall Tencent wired €1.16 billion in cash...
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1 min read
The Tariff Refund Only Flows One Direction: Up
Read more . . . →So the Supreme Court finally struck the tariffs down, 6-3, and ruled that Trump never had the authority to impose them in the first place. Good. Except the customs agency already collected about $133 billion before anyone made him stop. That money came out of the country one checkout line at a time — the average household paid somewhere north of a thousand bucks last year, manufacturing shed tens of thousands of jobs, and the whole thing was sold as toughness. Now a court has confirmed it was illegal the entire time. You’d think the obvious next step is giving...
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1 min read
They Bought The Stock, Not The Workers
Read more . . . →Meta cut roughly 8,000 jobs this year — about ten percent of a division — and dressed it up the way they always do: getting disciplined, freeing up resources for the AI bet, tough choices nobody wanted to make. Except in the same stretch of months the company authorized another forty billion dollars to buy back its own stock, and burned through more than seventeen billion of it in a single quarter. So the money was there. It was sitting right there the whole time. It just wasn’t earmarked for the people who got walked out by security. Here’s what...
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1 min read
The Layoffs Didn't Even Work
Read more . . . →They told you the robot was coming for your job. Eighty percent of companies deploying AI cut workers this year, and a Gartner study of 350 firms just confirmed what anyone with a calculator already suspected: the cuts didn’t boost returns at all. The companies that fired the most people got nothing for it. No productivity miracle, no margin bump, just a smaller payroll and the same balance sheet. They torched 184,000 jobs this year chasing a number that never showed up. And here’s the part that should make you throw something. Sam Altman — the guy selling the robot...
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1 min read
They Made 200 Years of Your Salary, Then Called You the Cost Problem
Read more . . . →The number that should be on every front page: at half the companies in the S&P 500, the median worker would have to clock in for 200 years to make what their CEO made last year. Two hundred. Last year that figure was 192, so the math is getting worse on schedule. Median CEO pay climbed almost 6% to $17.7 million in 2025, rewarded for “bigger profits and higher stock prices,” which is corporate for “we found new ways to pay you less.” At Coca-Cola the boss pulled roughly 1,739 times the median worker’s $17,947. Read that wage again. That’s...
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1 min read
Uber Spent Its AI Budget on Robots, Then Fired the People
Read more . . . →Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget in four months. Engineers ran the tab up on Cursor and the rest until the CTO admitted he was back to the drawing board, because the money he thought would last a year was already gone by April. So the company capped each engineer at $1,500 a month for robot coders — and then, days later, cut 23% of its HR department. Recruiters, facilities, the people who answer your benefits questions when something goes wrong. A spokesperson swears the layoffs had nothing to do with AI. Of course they don’t. Burn...
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