January
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News / layoffs
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1 min read
Tough Calls
Read more . . . →He’s been staring at the memo for three minutes. The yacht has not stopped. The document says Difficult Decisions in a font that costs more than your rent. He’s reading it the way a man reads a menu he already knows, on a boat he already owns, next to a drink he already poured. Somewhere onshore a building full of people are checking their emails every four minutes wondering if today is the day. The difficult decision is probably which floor to cut first, and he’ll make it between lunch and the second yacht in the background. The hard part...
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1 min read
Send-Off
Read more . . . →HR ordered the confetti before they ordered the severance. He’s carrying the box. Plant, notebooks, the whole personal-effects goodbye kit. She’s behind him in the doorway of the building he just left, blasting a confetti cannon at his back with genuine enthusiasm. His face says he found out this morning. Her face says she booked the party popper on Tuesday. Every company that cuts people runs the same playbook: a press release about “difficult decisions,” a Slack message that begins “as many of you know,” and apparently, somewhere on the ninth floor, a person with a drawer full of confetti...
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1 min read
Perks
Read more . . . →The table stays. You don’t. Two guys playing ping pong in one of those offices with a dark accent wall, pendant lighting, and a kombucha tap you’ve seen in every Series B sizzle reel. The screen on the wall behind them says Layoffs 3pm. Two words. The ball is mid-air. Neither player has looked up. This is the whole pitch deck in one photo: the perks are real, the culture is real, and the screen announcing that half the floor is gone by dinner is also real, mounted on the same bracket as the Sonos. The ball is still in...
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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
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
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
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
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
Meta Gives Six Execs $921M Each, Fires 700 Workers The Next Day
Read more . . . →Meta’s board just handed six top executives a new stock package that will pile $921 million onto each of their stacks. Less than 24 hours later, 700 Meta workers got the email. Same company. Same week. Same accountants. The scale breaks your brain if you let it sit. One executive’s new raise alone could keep every single fired worker employed at a solid salary for roughly two decades. There are six of them. Around five and a half billion dollars in fresh comp going to the exact people who decided which 700 families to torch before breakfast. Zuckerberg calls it...
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1 min read
Disney's New CEO Marks Day One By Firing 1,000 People
Read more . . . →Josh D’Amaro is two months into the Disney top job and already he’s sent the memo every new CEO sends: we’re cutting 1,000 jobs. Studio, TV, ESPN, Product & Tech. The castmembers who kept the magic running while the C-suite argued about streaming margins are cleaning out their desks so D’Amaro can prove to Wall Street he means business. Nothing says “happiest place on earth” like watching your boss announce your layoff in the third paragraph of a company-wide email. Disney is sitting on a $180 billion market cap. The first real move of the new regime is to squeeze...
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