Meta Platforms (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to fire one in five of his nearly 80,000 employees…
Several Meta sources told Reuters that senior leaders have started planning layoffs for around 16,000 of the company’s workforce.
A Meta spokesperson called the report “speculative reporting about theoretical approaches.”
That’s a whole lot of syllables to avoid saying, “Yep, that’s the plan, but we don’t want to talk about it yet.”
If the cuts do happen at that scale, it would be Meta’s largest restructuring since the “year of efficiency” in late 2022 and early 2023, when the company eliminated more than 21,000 jobs in two waves.
Then, it was a failed “metaverse” bet. Now, it’s artificial intelligence (“AI”).
The company is investing $600 billion over the next two years in data centers… buying up AI startups left and right… and offering AI researchers pay packages worth up to hundreds of millions of dollars.
This is exactly what we predicted last October…
Amazon’s corporate layoff is an early sign of what’s coming to other large tech companies. Back in 2022, Amazon was also the first mover – laying off 27,000 over several months. It was quickly followed by dozens of other well-known tech companies, shedding tens of thousands of their own employees.
Expect to see plenty more folks purged in the months ahead as tech companies refocus their spending from salaries to AI compute.
And of course, Amazon (AMZN) and Meta aren’t alone…
The AI Purge Is Coming to Every Tech Giant
Over at Oracle (ORCL), the picture is arguably worse…
Bloomberg reported earlier this month that the company is planning to cut thousands of jobs across multiple divisions to handle a cash crunch from its own AI data-center buildout. Investment bank TD Cowen estimates that Oracle could ax 20,000 to 30,000 jobs in an earlier report from CIO magazine.
That’s on top of the rolling cuts the company has already been making across the company for months now…
Oracle had previously disclosed a 2026 restructuring plan that it expected to cost up to $1.6 billion, primarily in severance… It then raised that restructuring budget by another $500 million in its latest earnings filing.
Then there’s Microsoft (MSFT), where the anxiety is different but no less real.
In early January, anonymous posts on Reddit and the workplace forum Blind claimed that Microsoft was preparing to cut up to 22,000 jobs. At the time, Microsoft’s Chief Communications Officer Frank X. Shaw issued a flat denial – calling the rumors “100 percent made up / speculative / wrong.”
We’ll see how true that remains as the year passes. As the Seattle Times noted, Microsoft spent some $88 billion on AI infrastructure last year… and went through several rounds of firings:
Last year, when Microsoft went through multiple waves of layoffs that ultimately affected 15,000 employees, the company announced job cuts as they occurred.
Those layoffs stretched from May to September, with two large waves in May and July.
The pattern can’t get any more obvious…
As AI costs go up and AI gets smarter, human headcounts come down.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella himself has previously said that 2026 could be “messy” as the tech industry shifts from AI demos to actual AI integration. He has also called Microsoft’s size a “massive disadvantage” in the AI race.
Whether or not Microsoft announces another major round of cuts this year, the structural pressure isn’t going away. When your CEO describes your workforce as a competitive liability, the writing is on the wall.
If you’re one of the 2.5 million to 3 million folks employed by a Big Tech company… your job is absolutely at risk, whether or not the company denies it today.
The AI Doom Loop Will Destroy Us All Eventually
Companies are cutting jobs, investing the savings in AI, and getting rewarded by investors.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this… It’s good that companies are becoming more efficient and using the latest AI technology to raise margins and prepare for the future.
But you don’t have to look too far out to start growing concerned about how big these job losses could grow, especially if something goes wrong in the economy or around the world.
I call it the AI “doom loop” for American workers…
In a normal bubble, the collapse is painful but self-limiting. Stocks crash. Companies go bankrupt. People lose money. Then the economy resets and rebuilds. And most important, people are still needed to do the rebuilding.
The AI bubble-and-crash scenario won’t work that way…
Even after a stock market crash, the data centers don’t disappear. The chips don’t stop working. The trained models don’t forget what they’ve learned.
Companies won’t stop using AI when their stock prices fall. They’ll use it more aggressively… because now they’re desperate to cut costs.
That means when the stock market crashes, practically every job that can be replaced by AI will be replaced by AI.
Of course, people are clever. We’ll create other interesting, human jobs in new industries. But it’s going to take time.
In that doom-loop article, we gave the example of the 50-year period during the early Industrial Revolution when GDP growth exploded, but workers’ wages stagnated for half a century. All the gains went to capital owners.
That could absolutely happen again today.
And if it does, it will be devastating for American workers, especially for anyone who currently sits at a desk. As I wrote on Friday, millions of white-collar workers should be exceptionally nervous right now…
Elon Musk’s latest AI project is designed to watch a computer screen in real time, tracking every keystroke and mouse movement, with the explicit goal of learning to do your job.
To do that, he’s using one of the most powerful supercomputers on Earth. And he’s not stopping at simply replacing a few white-collar workers. He’s aiming to be the winner that genuinely “takes it all.” As we wrote…
Every single day, AI gets better and smarter.
This is the backdrop against which almost every single major tech executive is racing to build the first artificial superintelligence.
Mathematician I.J. Good predicted in a 1965 paper that an “ultraintelligent machine” could improve itself in a loop, triggering what he called an “intelligence explosion.” He went on to add…
“[T]he intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”
And as we mentioned earlier, he predicted that such a machine would be, “the last invention that man need ever make.”
Musk appears to be aiming for exactly that with Project Apex… an AI that learns and evolves, to ultimately surpass any human brain.
And of course, Elon’s ambitions aren’t solely focused on AI. We detailed his growing empire last week…
In February, SpaceX acquired xAI in an all-stock deal – valuing the combined entity at $1.25 trillion. It was the largest corporate merger in history.
Musk justified it by pointing to “orbital data centers,” the idea that AI’s hunger for electricity and cooling could eventually be solved by putting compute power in space, powered by solar energy. The FCC filing SpaceX submitted contemplates up to one million satellites.
That merger folded together SpaceX’s rockets and Starlink satellite network, xAI’s Grok model and data centers, and X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Then Tesla invested $2 billion in xAI in January. Now Macrohard formally ties in Tesla’s hardware and computer vision expertise.
That’s a rocket company, a satellite Internet provider, a social-media network, an AI lab, a car company, and now a white-collar automation platform… all ultimately controlled by one man.
The SpaceX initial public offering (“IPO”), targeting a $1.5 trillion valuation and up to $50 billion in capital raised, could happen as soon as June. We detailed how investors could get access ahead of that IPO here.
Whether Elon’s grand vision succeeds or not, the concept is already taking hold across the industry.
The only question is who captures the resulting AI wealth… and who loses their income in the process?
