One thing unusual is occurring in tech proper now. Firms are posting document income and income whereas shedding tens of hundreds of individuals, citing AI because the official rationalization. To date this yr, there have been an estimated 363 layoffs at tech corporations this yr, affecting almost 150,000 folks — a tempo of about 974 folks per day, 44% sooner than final yr — in response to TrueUp, a tech job board and recruiting platform that additionally runs one of the vital broadly cited tech layoff trackers.
Tech layoffs hit their highest single month in two years final month, with almost 40,000 cuts, and AI was the most-cited motive for layoffs throughout each trade for the third month operating, in response to outplacement agency Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
There’s rising skepticism that AI is absolutely the wrongdoer, although — that it’s extra of a handy cowl story than the precise trigger. Few examples illustrate the pushback higher than what occurred at Block earlier this yr. After getting hammered over shedding almost half of Block earlier this yr, citing AI as the explanation, Jack Dorsey denied the cuts had been an indication of bother on the funds firm, insisting AI instruments “are enabling a brand new manner of working which essentially adjustments what it means to construct and run an organization.” He additionally acknowledged, when pressed by commenters on X in regards to the bloat he’d created in the course of the pandemic, that Block had, the truth is, over-hired.
Different voices have additionally begun to weigh in, together with famed VC Marc Andreessen, who not too long ago referred to as AI the “silver bullet excuse” for layoffs which are actually about pandemic-era overhiring. In conversation with podcaster-investor Harry Stebbings, Andreessen stated, “Primarily, each massive firm is overstaffed. It’s not less than overstaffed by 25%. I feel most massive corporations are overstaffed by 50%. I feel numerous them are overstaffed by 75%. Now all of them have the silver bullet excuse: Ah, it’s AI.”
What occurred earlier this month at Uber captures the anomaly effectively. The corporate lower about 23% of its folks division — the unit HR and recruiting — affecting lower than 1% of its 34,000 workers, it stated. An organization spokesperson specified that the cuts had nothing to do with AI. However the announcement got here roughly one month after Uber’s CTO supplied that the corporate had burned by means of its complete 2026 AI coding price range in 4 months and had to cap individual engineers’ spending on instruments like Cursor and Claude Code; no matter Uber stated publicly, it’s laborious to not join these dots.
What makes this flamable: on the very second that tens of hundreds of staff are being proven the door, a small cohort of AI insiders is changing into rich on a scale that’s laborious to grasp.
Early final month, AI chipmaker Cerebras Methods closed its first day on the Nasdaq up 68% from its $185 IPO value, giving the chipmaker a market cap of roughly $67 billion — the biggest US tech IPO since Snowflake’s 2020 debut. By the shut, co-founders Andrew Feldman and Sean Lie had been billionaires. (The corporate’s shares have since fallen 30%.)
SpaceX in the meantime went public on Friday and enjoys, as of this writing, a $2.1 trillion market cap, turning Musk right into a paper trillionaire and doubtlessly minting an estimated 4,400 millionaires, and round 400 centimillionaires within the course of, assuming the shares maintain up. Anthropic and OpenAI are quickly inching towards the general public market, too, each at valuations of roughly $1 trillion or extra.
Set towards that backdrop, Mark Zuckerberg’s newest buy takes on new that means. In early March, he bought a $170 million mansion on Miami’s “Billionaire Bunker” — setting the all-time document for the most costly residence sale in Miami-Dade County historical past. Two months later, Meta introduced it will lay off 8,000 peopleor roughly 10% of its workforce.
It isn’t simply Zuckerberg or the opposite tech titans who routinely shell out jaw-dropping sums on their actual property portfolios. However these extremes come at a second when many Individuals are getting squeezed more durable than they’ve been in yr.
Employees with employer-sponsored medical insurance face premium will increase of about 6% to 7% this yr, greater than double the speed of inflation, the price of personal medical insurance has roughly doubled since 2008, and median residence costs have climbed 28% since early 2020whereas mortgage charges have almost doubled.
In a January 2026 New York Occasions/Siena ballot, 65% of voters stated a middle-class life-style is out of attain, and a Might 2026 CNN/SSRS ballot discovered 76% of Americans now title value of dwelling as their high financial concern, up sharply from 58% a yr earlier.
Taken collectively, this isn’t only a story about job losses in isolation. It’s tens of hundreds of laid-off tech staff hitting an unusually unforgiving value setting on the identical time that tens of hundreds of AI insiders are seeing once-in-a-generation paper wealth materialize.
It isn’t laborious to discover a precedent for what occurs when that divide will get extensive sufficient. In 2008, a monetary disaster that started with free lending and over-the-top risk-taking on Wall Avenue ended with bailouts for the banks that brought about it, whereas thousands and thousands of Individuals misplaced jobs and houses within the Nice Recession that adopted. Three years later, that anger crystallized into Occupy Wall Avenue.
That would look quaint compared. Occupy Wall Avenue emerged from a disaster — banks wanted rescuing, and the general public anger was, at its core, about who paid for the cleanup. This time, there’s no crash to level to. Firms are worthwhile, AI itself is minting a brand new class of in a single day fortunes, and the layoffs are occurring anyway, with AI cited as the explanation. If the optics of 2008 had been, “We’re bailing out the individuals who broke the economic system whilst you lose your job,” the optics right here might find yourself being, “We’re getting richer than ever, off the very tech we’re utilizing to interchange you.”
As we’ve seen with Block, Atlassian, Cloudflare and others, tech corporations have watched their shares surge once they level to AI, so the technique is comprehensible. Nonetheless, they may wish to contemplate whether or not that’s actually the message they wish to ship to the folks they’re shedding, and to everybody else now watching.
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