Something rotten is brewing in Silicon Valley, and tech workers are starting to smell it.
According to a bombshell TechCrunch investigation, companies are posting record profits and revenue while laying off tens of thousands of people and blaming it on AI. The numbers are staggering: 363 layoffs at tech companies this year alone, affecting nearly 150,000 people. That's roughly 974 people losing their jobs every single day.
But industry insiders are openly questioning whether AI is really the culprit, or just a convenient cover story.
Jack Dorsey got caught red-handed on this one. After Block slashed nearly half its workforce earlier this year, the payments mogul insisted the cuts weren't trouble—they were just AI enabling "a new way of working." When called out by commenters on X about pandemic-era bloat, Dorsey finally admitted the truth: Block had massively over-hired.
Even venture capital heavyweight Marc Andreessen is weighing in. In a recent podcast with Harry Stebbings, Andreessen dropped the mic: "Every large company is overstaffed. Most are overstaffed by 50%. A lot are overstaffed by 75%. Now they all have the silver bullet excuse: Ah, it's AI."
While tens of thousands are getting pink slips, a tiny elite of AI insiders is becoming obscenely wealthy. AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems just closed its first Nasdaq day up 68%, hitting a market cap of roughly $67 billion—the largest US tech IPO in years.
Workers are furious. The disconnect between mass layoffs and executive windfalls is becoming impossible to ignore, and it's starting to feel less like business strategy and more like exploitation with a tech-bro veneer.
