One thing unusual is going on in tech proper now. Corporations are posting document income and income whereas shedding tens of 1000’s of individuals, citing AI because the official rationalization. To this point this yr, there have been an estimated 363 layoffs at tech firms this yr, affecting practically 150,000 folks — a tempo of about 974 folks per day, 44% quicker than final yr — in line with 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 practically 40,000 cuts, and AI was the most-cited cause for layoffs throughout each trade for the third month working, in line with outplacement agency Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
There’s rising skepticism that AI is basically 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 practically half of Block earlier this yr, citing AI as the rationale, Jack Dorsey denied the cuts have been an indication of bother on the funds firm, insisting AI instruments “are enabling a brand new method of working which essentially modifications 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 throughout 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 known as AI the “silver bullet excuse” for layoffs which can be actually about pandemic-era overhiring. In conversation with podcaster-investor Harry Stebbings, Andreessen mentioned, “Primarily, each massive firm is overstaffed. It’s at the least overstaffed by 25%. I feel most massive firms 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 paradox properly. The corporate minimize about 23% of its folks division — the unit HR and recruiting — affecting lower than 1% of its 34,000 workers, it mentioned. 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 way of its complete 2026 AI coding funds in 4 months and had to cap individual engineers’ spending on instruments like Cursor and Claude Code; no matter Uber mentioned publicly, it’s exhausting to not join these dots.
What makes this flamable: on the very second that tens of 1000’s of staff are being proven the door, a small cohort of AI insiders is changing into rich on a scale that’s exhausting to understand.
Early final month, AI chipmaker Cerebras Programs 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 most important US tech IPO since Snowflake’s 2020 debut. By the shut, co-founders Andrew Feldman and Sean Lie have 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 probably 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 house sale in Miami-Dade County historical past. Two months later, Meta introduced it might lay off 8,000 people, or 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.
Staff 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 non-public medical insurance has roughly doubled since 2008, and median house costs have climbed 28% since early 2020, whereas mortgage charges have practically doubled.
In a January 2026 New York Occasions/Siena ballot, 65% of voters mentioned a middle-class life-style is out of attain, and a Might 2026 CNN/SSRS ballot discovered 76% of Americans now title price of dwelling as their prime 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 1000’s of laid-off tech staff hitting an unusually unforgiving price atmosphere on the identical time that tens of 1000’s of AI insiders are seeing once-in-a-generation paper wealth materialize.
It isn’t exhausting to discover a precedent for what occurs when that divide will get broad sufficient. In 2008, a monetary disaster that started with free lending and over-the-top risk-taking on Wall Road ended with bailouts for the banks that triggered it, whereas hundreds of thousands of Individuals misplaced jobs and houses within the Nice Recession that adopted. Three years later, that anger crystallized into Occupy Wall Road.
That might look quaint as compared. Occupy Wall Road 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. Corporations are worthwhile, AI itself is minting a brand new class of in a single day fortunes, and the layoffs are taking place anyway, with AI cited as the rationale. If the optics of 2008 have been, “We’re bailing out the individuals who broke the financial 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 exchange you.”
As we’ve seen with Block, Atlassian, Cloudflare and others, tech firms have watched their shares surge once they level to AI, so the technique is comprehensible. Nonetheless, they could need to contemplate whether or not that’s actually the message they need to ship to the folks they’re shedding, and to everybody else now watching.
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