News / corporate-greed
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1 min read
$133 Billion and a Three-Minute Call
Read more . . . →Microsoft posted $133.7 billion in net profit this year. Up thirty-one percent. Then they fired 3,200 Xbox workers, some of them in three-minute phone calls from Montreal. Fifth round of layoffs in three years. The gaming division pulled in $21.8 billion and added two hundred million players. The people who built the games those players showed up for got a call shorter than a cigarette break telling them September is their last month. Hundreds of those workers are CWA union members who just organized and are fighting for first contracts. Microsoft started cutting while negotiations were still open. The union...
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1 min read
He Bought the Picket Line
Read more . . . →Tesla just ended the longest strike in modern Swedish history. One thousand and twenty-one days of industrial action, and the company’s resolution strategy was to write severance checks to every remaining striker until IF Metall had nobody left to represent. The walkout started in October 2023 over something basic: Tesla refused to sign a collective bargaining agreement. In Sweden, where those agreements cover 90% of the workforce, that refusal was never a negotiation tactic. It was a declaration. Three years later, the agreement is still unsigned, and Tesla operates in Sweden with zero union representation. At the strike’s peak, 500...
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1 min read
312 to 1 and Nobody Blinked
Read more . . . →The AFL-CIO dropped its annual number this week: 312. That’s how many times the average S&P 500 CEO out-earned the median American worker last year. It was 285 the year before. Average package: $22.8 million. Average worker: $73,000. One of these people sat in meetings. The other one did the work those meetings were about. CEO pay went up 21% in a single year while the people who generate the revenue got whatever their annual review felt like giving them. Then there’s Musk, who broke the spreadsheet entirely. His Tesla comp package was $158 billion — fourteen times the total...
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1 min read
Your Groceries Have Surge Pricing Now
Read more . . . →Walmart is putting digital price tags on every shelf in every store by the end of this year. They say it’s about efficiency — updating a price used to take two days with paper tags, now it takes minutes. What they’re not telling you is that the same technology lets them change the price of milk at 5pm when every tired parent in the zip code walks through the door. The grocery workers’ union has a name for it: surveillance pricing. Uber for your cereal aisle. The tags can respond to foot traffic, time of day, weather, local demand. The...
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1 min read
Walmart Gets $2.4 Billion Back. You Get the Receipt.
Read more . . . →Walmart just got a $2.4 billion refund check from the federal government. Apple got $2.19 billion. Amazon, $600 million. Ford, $1.3 billion. Your refund: zero. Trump spent two years collecting $166 billion in tariffs that the Supreme Court ruled were illegal, and now the money is flowing back — to the corporations that filed the customs paperwork. You paid the markup at the register for two straight years. You ate the price hikes on everything from groceries to sneakers. The refund process is designed so that only the “importer of record” can claim a cent. You were never the importer...
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1 min read
You're Paying to Power the Machine That Replaced You
Read more . . . →Oracle fired 30,000 people in March to free up cash for AI data centers. No warning. Employees got termination emails at 6am from “Oracle Leadership” — not from their manager, not from HR — a mass email from the void telling them their role had been eliminated and today was their last day. The company needed $50 billion for server farms, and the fastest way to find it was to stop paying humans. Call it what it is: a cash grab with a body count. Here’s where it gets good. Those data centers need electricity — obscene amounts of it...
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1 min read
Record Buybacks, Record Insider Selling. Do the Math.
Read more . . . →In July, S&P 500 companies announced $166 billion in stock buybacks — the biggest July on record. That’s the corporate treasury spending shareholder money to hoover up its own shares and tell everyone the stock is a bargain too good to pass up. So here’s the number they’d rather not put in the same sentence: the executives signing off on those buybacks sold $77.6 billion of their own stock in the first half of the year, the second-fastest insider selling pace in more than two decades. With their own cash, those same insiders bought back $6.9 billion. They sold roughly...
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1 min read
BILL Had a Good Quarter, So It Fired a Third of You
Read more . . . →BILL Holdings had a good quarter. Revenue up 13 percent, earnings beat, the kind of numbers a company puts in a press release with an exclamation point. So on May 7 the board did the obvious thing with all that success: it moved to fire up to a third of the company — roughly 700 people out of about 2,333 — and on the exact same day authorized a billion dollars to buy back its own stock. Not a slow quarter. Not a demand cliff. A beat. The money was never missing. There was a billion dollars sitting right there,...
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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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Tariff Refunds Are Coming. You're Not Getting a Dime.
Read more . . . →The government is about to start handing out tariff refunds on April 20th. Billions flowing back to the companies that “passed the costs on to consumers” — their words, not mine. So naturally those savings are coming back to us too, right? Of course not. CNBC surveyed a bunch of CFOs and not a single one plans to share the refund money with customers. Zero. Every penny stays at the top. This is the grift working exactly as designed. Trump slaps tariffs on everything, prices go up, companies jack their margins and blame “the tariffs,” and when the refunds come...
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