In May of this year, Meta announced it  would be laying off around 8,000 employees,  

or around 10% of its entire workforce. Just  2 months before that, it laid off a further  

700 people, and 2 months before that, it  was another 1,500 people. Again, in 2025,  

it laid off a further 4,000 people, including  a large chunk from its AI division. And this  

was all on top of the record layoffs from its  year of efficiency, which actually lasted 3  

years and cut an additional 26,000 jobs. Now,  obviously, this hasn't been great for morale,  

even after the Zuck mandated that people start  having fun again, but if you do the math,  

that's collectively around 40,000 people  that have been laid off over the last 4  

and 1/2 years. All from a company that only had  around 75,000 employees to begin with. For most  

of the other major tech companies, the numbers  aren't really much better. And in specific cases,  

they are actually much worse. This also isn't  including the people who have just, you know,  

made their you money and quit. Now, obviously,  big tech in particular has been changing rapidly.  

Companies are investing hundreds of billions of  dollars into AI development, which means they  

just have less free cash flow to pay their staff  and a greater incentive to justify that very same  

investment by doing supposedly AI enabled layoffs.  But if this is really happening so broadly,  

how many jobs do these companies really have left  a cut? Well, the good news or the inconvenient  

truth is uh basically just as many as they  started with. Apart from the outliers like X,  

most of the major tech companies have just as many  people today as they did when layoffs became the  

hot new trend in the valley. The same is true  for more traditional industries as well that  

have quietly had to curb their layoff enthusiasm.  And this does raise the obvious question of why  

bother? These companies have effectively passed  the same group of technical talent around between  

one another, killed the vibes that they so  clearly covet, undermined the job security  

that made tech jobs so desirable in the first  place, all to generate headlines that didn't  

really look as good as they thought they would.  So, what was all of this for? This week alone,  

about a dozen major companies announced job  cuts, including Amazon and Google's parent,  

Alphabet. Meta announced Thursday that it's laying  off about 8,000 workers as it continues to ramp up  

spending on artificial intelligence. In a dramatic  twist, Open AI Sam Alman has revealed that Meta is  

dangling jaw-dropping $100 million signing bonuses  to lure his top engineers. 76% of Nvidia employees  

are millionaires and 37% are worth over $20  million. How crazy is that? Ford has rehired  

350 experienced engineers after admitting that  artificial intelligence alone did not deliver  

the quality it expected in vehicle development.  Okay, so even if you set aside the very real human  

cost of doing all of this and just look at it  through the cold dead eyes of corporate strategy,  

these layoffs have still been doing real damage  to the companies making them. The most immediate  

damage is just to workplace morale, which I know  might sound a little bit wishy-washy, but in roles  

that rely on talent in highly collaborative  environments like tech development, it can  

be a big deal. Workplace researchers have observed  what they have dubbed turnover contagion. The idea  

is that when a round of layoffs goes through, the  survivors start updating their resumes and people  

who are already thinking about quitting naturally  become slightly more motivated to make that jump.  

Andrea Durler, who leads research at the workplace  analytics firm Vizier, describes this whole cycle  

as a clear failure of workforce planning, which is  the polite academic way of saying these companies  

keep firing people they still need. The second  problem is that especially in technical roles,  

a lot of doing the job well just comes down  to having done the job for a long enough time.  

Institutional knowledge like which workarounds  actually matter and which cursed legacy code  

should never be touched and even really basic  things like who sits at what desk makes a big  

difference in how quickly stuff gets done. In  theory, companies like to imagine that this gets  

captured in a handover dock. In reality, even  if the laid-off workers really did want to put  

their all into teaching their replacement how to  do their job, it still doesn't. I will get into  

this particular example in detail a little bit  later, but Ford recently had to hire back a team  

of senior quality assurance engineers charmingly  referred to as the Greybeards to address certain  

failings in the company's production. The  company had attempted to replace them with  

an AI system overseen by a much smaller team of  more technically qualified but significantly less  

experienced operators. And well, credit where  credit is due, the company reversed this move,  

acknowledging the problem that there was nobody  left who could tell the AI why it was being  

dumb. Now, this is a problem because when a  company eventually realizes it cut too deep,  

getting people back usually costs a lot more  than keeping them around in the first place.  

If a company is rehiring someone, that normally  means they were a talented employee and they've  

usually landed somewhere else. So businesses are  paying a premium on top of the recruiter fees and  

layoff expense to get people back who for obvious  reasons don't necessarily want to work for  

companies who have a reputation for letting people  go. Companies like Meta have developed such a bad  

reputation for morale turnovers and layoffs  that they are now paying a measurable premium  

to hire new staff because if given a choice,  people would take almost any other option for  

the same level of pay. More broadly, according to  industry estimates, laid-off roles are now being  

refilled at a significant premium from what the  original position paid in the first place. Some  

of the people they want back also just simply  aren't coming back at all. Laid-off employees  

naturally realize that their employer doesn't  and didn't really care about them. Of course,  

that was probably always true, but actually being  laid off makes it a bit harder to ignore. Support  

groups for laid-off Googlers reportedly ballooned  after 2023 cuts, full of people who hadn't written  

resumes in 15 years because they genuinely  believed they found the last job they would  

ever need. Now, I know there's a level of irony  in these people losing their extremely highly  

compensated jobs, often developing the tech that  replaced them, especially since, let's be honest  

here, a lot of them would happily automate other  jobs if it meant a slightly more lucrative RSU  

package. But the point here is that purely from  the business perspective, if layoffs were supposed  

to cut costs, they haven't been doing a very good  job. This is also ignoring things like severance,  

higher unemployment insurance rates, and recruiter  fees to enable the constant churn. The losses  

aren't random either. Stanford economist Nick  Bloom pointed out that attrition driven by return  

to office mandates loses companies or best people  first because the best people are the ones with  

outside options. What's left is mostly the people  who couldn't afford to leave. Now, obviously,  

mandatory return to office is slightly different  from layoffs, but they were done with the same  

intention of thinning out the workforce, hoping  that people would quit instead of publicly having  

to reduce headcount. Now, it sounds dumb, but  it gets dumber. So far, these have just been the  

immediate costs. Entry-level hiring has collapsed  by somewhere between 55 and 65% at the major tech  

companies since the layoff era began. IBM's head  of HR, Nicol Maro, has been unusually blunt,  

warning that if you cut the pipeline, there's  no secession talent in 3 to 5 years. And IBM is  

now tripling its entry-level hiring to patch the  hole it dug for itself. And on top of all of that,  

these companies are burning the thing that made  them special employers in the first place. A job  

at Google used to be the prize. Partly this was  because of the pay, which at the time was decent  

but still inferior to something like finance,  but mostly because it was seen as the best  

place in the world to work. It had cool offices,  interesting projects, a decent work life balance,  

a vibe culture, and most importantly, good job  security. If that perception dies, the smartest  

people can just take their talents to finance  instead, which pays comparably, never pretended to  

love you, and is somehow now the less risky option  for a high performer who doesn't want to find out  

from a LinkedIn notification that they no longer  work there. Now, to play devil's advocate here,  

despite the beanag chairs and kombucha on tap,  these are still for-profit companies, not a  

jobs program. Even if there are costs associated  with doing layoffs, and there are a lot of costs,  

it could be argued that endlessly accumulating  staff who feel overly secure in the role would  

end up costing a business more, especially if all  their competitors are willing to pay a premium to  

poach their best talent. But well, these companies  are still accumulating workers. Alphabet finished  

2025 with around 190,000 employees, essentially  back to its all-time peak. Microsoft ended its  

last fiscal year with 228,000 people, identical  to the year before, despite cutting roughly 15,000  

across two heavily publicized rounds. And Amazon  is within 2% of its 2021 high even after 4 years  

of going allin on headcount efficiency. So, the  workforce is right back to where it started. And  

since most entry-level hiring has been so slow,  this pool of workers has mostly been maintained  

with people just moving to the next company in  line. So they did all of this, accounted for all  

of these costs, accepted the human toll, took the  morale and reputational hits, all to effectively  

just play past the parcel of employees. Which  raises the obvious question of why? Well,  

Stanford business professor Jeffrey Feffer  has spent decades on this exact question, and  

his conclusion has been depressingly consistent.  Layoffs repeatedly failed to cut costs or improve  

performance once you account for severance, morale  damage, and lost productivity. The same was true  

for headcount trimming efforts like return to  office mandates. Researchers at the University  

of Pittsburgh's Catz Business School went looking  for financial improvement at S&P 500 companies  

that imposed strict return to office mandates  and found no significant improvement at all.  

Employee satisfaction, on the other hand, dropped  measurably. Now, say what you want about the  

senior leadership of these companies. Most of them  aren't stupid. They are capable of reading these  

studies and understanding the basic cost benefit  of what they are doing. But across corporate  

America and particularly in tech, they are doing  it anyway for three simple reasons. The first is  

quite simply human vindictiveness. For the last  decade in particular, tech workers had a little  

bit too much power and security, safe in the fact  that nobody else could do what they do, which  

bred a culture very different from a standard  corporate hierarchy. Staff pushed social agendas,  

spoke out against their own bosses, worked their  own schedules, and demanded recognition for their  

achievements. You know, a true nightmare scenario.  A lot of these companies leaned into this idea  

when it was convenient for talent acquisition.  But it has become pretty clear that the actual  

executives at the top of these businesses, not so  secretly, despised this culture. People like Zuck  

may have been the CEO of one of the most powerful  companies on Earth. But his entitled employees  

didn't kiss the ground around his feet like  they ought to in a more traditional company. The  

Wall Street Journal ran what might as well be the  era's mission statement as a headline. The bosses  

are back in charge. Executives saw the layoff  wave as a chance to put entitled workers back  

in their place after the leverage workers built  up during the great resignation and the remote  

work boom. The commentator Ed Zitron went further  in a piece bluntly titled tech elite hates labor,  

arguing that the industry resents having created  a pampered class of worker that it now has to  

cater to and overpay. Even several prominent  people within tech have been happy to say the  

quiet part out loud. Venture capitalist Keith  Rabo boy said Meta and Google hired thousands  

of people to do fake work out of vanity called  those workers extraneous and held up Elon Musk's  

Twitter purge where roughly 80% of the company  was cut as the model the rest of the industry  

should copy. Venture capitalists and real life  Baron from Dune. Mark Andre mocked the remote  

laptop class. David Saxs called Twitter bloated  and overstaffed. All of this meant that when  

mass layoffs became more commonplace across the  industry and these executives saw that their stock  

price wouldn't take a hit for doing it and in many  cases would actually trend upwards, a lot of them  

were more than happy to dive in, even if the  long-term benefits would be questionable. Sure,  

they might have just ended up passing the same  people along to the next company, but it did still  

send the message that nobody is irreplaceable. The  HR software company Bamboo HR surveyed more than  

1500 managers and found that roughly a quarter  of sea suite executives openly admitted that they  

hoped return to office mandates would get people  to quit voluntarily. About 20% of HR leaders said  

their inoff rules were specifically designed to  drive attrition. And around 40% of managers said  

layoffs followed because not enough people left on  their own. And again, this was just what they were  

publicly admitting to. I don't get it. Why are  they confessing? They're not confessing. They're  

bragging. The sad part is it kind of worked.  In one survey, the share of workers who said  

they would quit over a mandatory return to office  collapsed from 51% to just 7% in a single year.  

Again, this is just one variable. But ultimately,  people have now been trained to hold on to their  

jobs at all cost. It's not great, but even  the most vindictive CEO still needs to justify  

their smiting to shareholders who don't have  endless patience for workplace power politics.  

So, it's time to learn How many works to find  out how they have actually justified this so  

far and why it's kind of backfiring on them. This  video is sponsored by ODO. ODU is the all-in-one  

business management platform that pulls sales,  accounting, inventory, manufacturing, e-commerce,  

and CRM into a single connected system instead of  forcing you to juggle five different tools that do  

not talk to each other. What makes ODU work is how  seamlessly it ties everything together. You only  

install the apps you actually need and they share  data automatically. A sale in your storefront  

updates inventory and accounting in real time, so  you do not have to manually update your different  

systems, and you get to stay more organized. We  use ODO ourselves. Our works library runs entirely  

on ODO, and having everything in one dashboard has  made the day-to-day so much smoother. It is also  

intuitive and highly customizable, which makes  it a good fit for small to mediumsiz businesses  

that have limited technical expertise and want  software that adapts to how they work instead of  

the other way around. And because ODU automates  the routine stuff, invoicing, restock alerts,  

follow-ups, you spend less time doing admin or  stitching tools together, and more time actually  

running your business. If you want to see how  ODU can streamline your own business, you can  

book a free meeting with an ODO expert or try the  full platform free for 15 days with no credit card  

required or even keep a single app free for life.  Check it out using my link in the description.  

So big tech bosses with bruised egos finally  getting one up on the people who actually  

built their technology in the first place is  nice and all, but outside of their emotional  

support podcasts, this kind of justification isn't  going to fly. Expensive and financially damaging  

layoffs still need to hold up to the scrutiny from  shareholders. But well, if anything, they have  

been right on board, largely because of the equity  math. A huge chunk of tech compensation is paid in  

restricted stock units or RSUs. Grants of company  shares that drip out to an employee over about  

four years depending on the exact agreement, but  only as long as they stick around long enough to  

collect them. This has been a great deal for these  companies because it allows them to pay worldclass  

engineers worldclass compensation with shares it  can print rather than money it has to earn. And it  

also means that staff are compelled to stay with  their company to actually receive shares they have  

technically already earned. But printing shares  creates its own problem. Every RSU that eventually  

vests is a brand new share, and every brand new  share makes everyone else's slice of the company  

a little thinner. Shareholders are uh not fans of  getting thinner. Now, over the last decade, the  

solution to this has been stock buyback programs  largely just to mop this up. The company takes  

real cash and buys its own shares off the open  market to cancel out the new ones being minted for  

staff. Analysts have estimated that over the last  several years, effectively all of Meta's roughly  

$96 billion of buybacks and around 90% of Google's  156 billion went to sterilizing the dilution from  

employee stock compensation. So yeah, effectively  they were just paying their staff out of their  

retained earnings in a very roundabout way.  Eventually shareholders realized that this  

would all work a lot better, at least in the short  term, if companies kept doing buybacks while doing  

less stock creation for their employees. When  someone gets cut before their RSUs finish vesting,  

the unvested shares just disappear. They were  never created. So, the dilution never happens,  

and the company even gets to reverse the expense  it had already booked. In normal times, this would  

mean that more of the buyback money could go to  bidding up the price of stock in regular markets.  

But well, we are not really in normal times right  now. All of the money that was going to buybacks  

to offset these stock bonuses is now going to  data centers instead. Now, I have already spoken  

endlessly about this spending, so I am not going  to waste your time again. But the point is that  

they can either spend money on stock buybacks,  spend money on neutralizing RSUs, or spend money  

on data centers. They don't have enough to do  all three. Google and Meta have already started  

scaling back their buyback programs. And some  of these companies are now issuing debt to fund  

data center construction or going even further and  actually issuing new shares onto public markets.  

For existing shareholders, this made them much  more amendable to a level of employee churn to  

avoid employees actually collecting their stock  to sell on public markets. Most of the big firms  

vest RSUs at a flat rate of about 25% per year.  So, if you earn $200,000 in stock compensation  

in a given year, you get $50,000 after the  first 12 months, $50,000 12 months after that,  

and so on. But if you keep working there,  those future bonuses keep stacking up. So,  

even assuming your bonuses stay totally flat,  if you quit, you are still walking away from as  

much as $500,000 in compensation that you will  have theoretically already earned. And again,  

this is in companies that spread things evenly.  Amazon schedule is infamously backloaded at 5, 15,  

40, and 40%. So, an Amazon employee cut 2 years  in has collected just 20% of the equity they were  

promised. People have started reading these  schedules very carefully for reasons that are  

probably obvious by now. In a culture of permanent  churn, a lot of these RSUs simply never live  

long enough to vest. Now, if you hypothetically  wanted to be a bit cynical, according to company  

financials, there are currently over a quarter of  a trillion dollars in outstanding stock waiting to  

be accessed by employees in just the top seven  tech companies alone. That's also only as of  

the date those bonuses were actually granted. If  you get awarded 100 shares worth $50,000 and then  

the price doubles next year before it's actually  handed over to you to liquidate, you still get 100  

shares. they are just now worth $100,000. Now, of  course, in theory, this is a nice way to motivate  

staff to align them behind a stock price, but  it also means that the true value of outstanding  

stock incoming RSUs is likely to be significantly  higher than what has been expensed. Because over  

the last 3 years, when a majority of that stock  was vested, the average value of a mag 7 company  

has roughly quadrupled. Realistically, that means  there is something like half a trillion dollars  

worth of stock that will be hitting the market  over the next 2 years coming from the employees  

at these companies. And that's also ignoring the  stock coming from this year's slate of mega IPOs.  

That's a lot of stock hitting a market on top of a  potent combination of reduced buybacks, increased  

capital raises, stretched valuations, and further  bonuses going towards newly hired staff in the AI  

space. Even more simply, more money coming out of  the market than going into it. Now, to be fair,  

these pools of unreleased stockbased compensation  are still at record highs thanks to record high  

prices and huge AI based pay packages, but they  would be significantly higher again if they  

weren't continuously scraped down over the last 4  years. I know this sounds a little bit tinfoilty,  

but it's worth keeping in mind that locked up  expiration and insiders looking to liquidate  

their winning positions was one of the key  catalysts for the unwinding of the dot bubble.  

At the very least, it's not unreasonable to think  that executives are considering ways to manage  

this ballooning obligation. Now, if all of that  was a lot of boring numbers, well, that's kind  

of the point. Equity engineering is boring, which  is why most of the headlines have been focused on  

the third major justification, which is the AI  tools that all of these shenanigans were going  

to finance in the first place. AI was supposed  to make the whole layoff era make sense. There  

are naturally a lot of headlines when a major  company cuts tens of thousands of workers,  

but usually a lot less attention when they hire  back just as many to cover over shortcomings,  

but people are now starting to notice. And well,  it's kind of getting a little bit embarrassing. I  

mentioned Ford earlier because they leaned hard  on AIdriven quality inspection. Now, on paper,  

this is actually a perfect use case for pattern  recognition software because inspection work is  

repetitive, datari, and hopefully consistent. But  well, to nobody's surprise, according to their  

chief operating officer, Kumar Ghotra, the systems  were not getting the desired results while quality  

failures were costing the company billions. So  Ford went out and rehired roughly 350 of their  

veteran Graveybeard engineers it had let go and  put them back on the line. The CEO of Coinbase,  

Brian Armstrong, apparently went full founder  mode and reportedly fired engineers who  

didn't on board the company's AI coding tools  within a week. According to their own claims,  

somewhere between a third and 40% of Coinbase's  code is now written by AI. Unfortunately,  

they announced this a few days before their  entire platform went offline for several hours  

due to technical issues. And then just last  week, literally as I was writing this video,  

Coinbase's AI powered prediction market alerts  pushed breaking news to millions of users,  

announcing that Norway had beaten Brazil 3  to2 in the World Cup before the match had  

even kicked off. Now, putting aside the horrors of  having a prediction market on top of a supposedly  

respectable investment platform, this is obviously  not a great look. Companies mess things up all the  

time, but customers and even investors are  a lot less forgiving of those mistakes when  

leadership has made a big deal about getting  rid of people that were there to avoid them in  

the first place. More broadly, a report by Robert  Half found that roughly one in three managers who  

cut a role citing AI has already rehired for  the same or similar position. Org view found  

that 55% of leaders who made AIdriven cuts now  admit it was a mistake and Gardner projects that  

by 2027 half of all AI blamed layoffs will have  rehired the role under a new job title. Forester  

found roughly the same with one extra twist. A  lot of the rehires are coming from offshore at  

lower pay. So the original workers still lost.  And then of course there is the part we already  

knew. According to a rumé.org or survey, 59%  of companies that cited AI is the reason for  

layoffs admitted they emphasized AI's role because  it plays better with stakeholders than admitting  

to financial constraints. It sounds bad, but it  gets worse. This whole game has created almost  

a cult-like culture around a really strange  idea, particularly in the tech industry. So, go  

and watch this video next to find out why you are  apparently going to spend the rest of your days in  

the permanent underclass. And don't forget to like  and subscribe to keep on learning how money works.