Economists came up with a name for 2026 and said the quiet part straight into a microphone: the “jobless boom.” Corporate profits are sitting at the highest share of the economy since 1950. Workers’ share of what they actually produce just hit the lowest point since the government started counting in 1947. The 500 biggest companies grew earnings 28% last quarter. The seven tech giants grew theirs 63%. And they’re spending that money to fire you. Meta’s own internal memos described its May layoffs as a way to “offset the cost of AI investments” — corporate for: we swapped your paycheck for a data center and we’d love a round of applause.
This is the part where someone tells you it’s just the market doing what markets do. It isn’t. Somebody chose this. Eight hundred billion dollars is going into AI compute this year, nearly double last year, and the bill is being paid in human beings — 142,000 of them in tech alone, most cut loose by companies posting record numbers. You don’t walk 142,000 people out the door because you’re hurting. You do it because you figured out you can keep the profit and skip the payroll, and nobody with any power over you has a reason to stop.
So when they call it a “boom,” ask the only question that’s left: for whom. Not for the guy escorted out by security with eleven years of equity and a cardboard box. Not for everyone whose wages have been sliding since 1980 while the line keeps climbing. A boom is supposed to feel like something. If yours arrived as a layoff notice, it was never your boom — it was theirs, and you were the cost they cut to pay for it.