Something strange is happening in the world of technology right now. Companies are making record profits and revenues while laying off tens of thousands of people, citing AI as the official explanation. So far this year, there have been an estimated 363 layoffs at tech companies, impacting nearly 150,000 people, according to TrueUp, a tech job board and recruiting platform that operates one of the most widely cited tech layoff trackers. That’s about 974 people per day, 44% faster than last year.
Last month, technology layoffs fell by nearly 40,000, the highest in a single month in two years, and for the third month in a row, AI was the most cited reason for layoffs across all industries, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
But there is growing skepticism about whether AI is really the culprit, wondering if it is more of a convenient cover story than the actual cause. There are few better examples of the backlash than what happened with the payments company block earlier this year. After coming under fire for laying off nearly half of his company earlier this year, Jack Dorsey denied the layoffs were a sign of trouble, arguing instead that AI tools are “enabling new ways of working that fundamentally change what it means to start and run a company.” Bullock also admitted that he had indeed overhired when pressed by an X commenter about the bloat he caused during the pandemic.
Other voices are starting to make an impact, including prominent venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. He recently called AI the “silver bullet excuse” for pandemic-era overemployment and layoffs. In a conversation with podcaster and investor Harry Stebbings, Andreessen said, “Essentially, every large company is overstaffed. At least 25% overstaffed. I think most large companies are 50% overstaffed. I think many are 75% overstaffed. Every company now has a silver bullet excuse: Ah, AI.”
What happened with Uber earlier this month illustrates that ambiguity. The company said it had cut about 23% of its human resources department (human resources and recruiting), affecting less than 1% of its 34,000 employees. A company spokesperson clarified that the cuts have nothing to do with AI. But the announcement comes about a month after Uber’s CTO suggested the company would burn through its 2026 AI coding budget in four months and would need to limit individual engineer spending on tools like Cursor and Claude Code. No matter what Uber says publicly, people want to connect the dots.
What makes this combustible is that at the very moment tens of thousands of workers are being ushered in the door, a small group of AI insiders are becoming wealthy on a scale that is difficult to fathom.
Early last month, AI chipmaker Cerebra Systems closed its first day of trading on the Nasdaq up 68% from its IPO price of $185, giving the chipmaker a market cap of about $67 billion and making it the largest U.S. tech IPO since Snowflake’s debut in 2020. By the end, co-founders Andrew Feldman and Sean Lee were billionaires. (The company’s stock price has since fallen 30%.)
Meanwhile, SpaceX went public on Friday and enjoys a market capitalization of $2.1 trillion as of this writing, making Mr. Musk a paper trillionaire and potentially creating an estimated 4,400 billionaires and about a quarter-billionaire in the process, assuming stock prices don’t fall. Anthropic and OpenAI are also rapidly moving toward public markets, with both valued at around $1 trillion or more.
Against this backdrop, Mark Zuckerberg’s latest purchase takes on new meaning. In early March, he purchased a $170 million mansion for a Miami “billionaire banker,” setting an all-time record for the most expensive home sale in Miami-Dade County history. Two months later, Meta announced it would lay off 8,000 people, about 10% of its workforce.
Zuckerberg and other tech giants aren’t the only ones who routinely spend staggering amounts of money on their real estate portfolios. But these extreme circumstances come at a time when many Americans are being squeezed even more severely than they have been in recent years.
Workers with employer-sponsored health insurance face premium increases of about 6% to 7% this year, more than twice the rate of inflation, the cost of private health insurance has nearly doubled since 2008, median home prices have risen 28% since the start of 2020, and mortgage rates have nearly doubled.
A January 2026 New York Times/Siena poll found that 65% of voters said a middle-class lifestyle was unaffordable, and a May 2026 CNN/SSRS poll found that 76% of Americans now cited the cost of living as their top financial concern, up from 58% a year earlier.
In short, this is not a story about unemployment alone. At the same time that tens of thousands of laid-off tech workers are facing an unusually tough cost environment, tens of thousands of AI insiders are seeing once-in-a-generation paper wealth materialize.
It’s not hard to find precedent for what happens when that gap widens enough. In 2008, the financial crisis that began with unrestrained lending and excessive risk-taking on Wall Street ended with a bailout of the banks that caused it, but the ensuing Great Recession left millions of Americans without jobs and homes. Three years later, that anger crystallized into Occupy Wall Street.
If the current trajectory holds, it may look strange by comparison. “Occupy Wall Street” is out of the woods. The banks needed a bailout, but the crux of the public’s anger was who was paying for the cleanup. This time there are no crashes to point out. Companies are making profits, AI itself is creating new kinds of wealth overnight, and layoffs that are attributed to AI are happening anyway. If the view in 2008 was, “You lose your job while we bail out the people who crashed the economy,” the view here may be, “We’re richer than ever because of the very technology we’re using to replace you.”
This strategy makes sense, as we’ve seen many companies, including Block, Atlassian, and Cloudflare, see their stock prices soar when they focus on AI. Still, you might want to consider whether that’s really the message you want to send to the person being fired, and to everyone else who’s paying attention right now.
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