News / corporate
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1 min read
They Fired You and Blamed the Robot
Read more . . . →Almost six out of ten companies now admit they frame layoffs as “AI-driven” when the real reason is financial. Straight up. Into a survey. Block fired forty percent of its workforce and the stock jumped twenty-four percent the same day. Dorsey posted $2.87 billion in gross profit that quarter. Cloudflare axed eleven hundred people — a fifth of the company — while reporting record revenue up thirty-four percent. These aren’t companies in trouble. These are companies doing better than ever who figured out Wall Street pays you more per share when you have fewer employees. Meta’s internal memos said the...
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1 min read
She Came from UnitedHealth and Promised Not to Make Trouble
Read more . . . →The CDC has a new director. The last one got fired for disagreeing with RFK Jr. about vaccines — the real kind, the kind that wiped out polio, not the Facebook comment section kind. The replacement is Dr. Erica Schwartz, previously of UnitedHealth Group, where she pulled $850,000 a year. At her confirmation hearing she said vaccines are safe and effective, then dodged every question about whether she’d push back if Kennedy told her otherwise. Said she was “unaware” of some of his policy changes. The whole audition was don’t know anything, don’t push back. The agency she’s inheriting has...
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1 min read
The Layoff Came With a LinkedIn Post Explaining Why It Was Good
Read more . . . →Monday.com cut one in five of its people this week — about 630 jobs out of 3,000 — and the cofounder went on LinkedIn to make sure you understood it wasn’t what it looked like. His words: this “was not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI.” Read that against the same filing, where the company says it’s trimming headcount to run “leaner” as it bets the whole product on its AI platform. And here’s the part that gives it away: Monday.com still projects up to 20% revenue growth this year. This isn’t a drowning company throwing weight...
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1 min read
Amazon Fired the People Building the Robot That Was Coming for You
Read more . . . →Amazon spent two years telling everyone that AI was the future and your job was the past. This week it laid off people inside its AGI unit — the actual team building the models that were supposedly going to replace you — while it keeps pouring $200 billion into the data centers those models live in. Read that twice. They kept the concrete and cut the brains. The engineers writing the thing that was going to make you obsolete just found out they were a cost center too. This is where the whole pitch falls apart if you look at...
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1 min read
Citi Paid Fraser $42 Million to Cut 20,000 Jobs
Read more . . . →Jane Fraser is running Citigroup through the biggest layoff in its modern history — 20,000 jobs on the chopping block, 7,000 already gone — and the board handed her a 22% raise for it. Forty-two million dollars for 2025. The reorganization that emptied those desks is the same reorganization her pay package rewards. She didn’t get paid despite the cuts. She got paid for them. Here’s the part nobody says out loud: at the top, mass firing is a resume line. Every worker she cut was a number that made a slide look better, and the slide is what the...
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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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