The email lands at 6 a.m. Your badge stops working by 9. By noon you're refreshing real estate listings in a city where the house you'll never afford just sold for two million over asking — to someone who works at the AI lab that, according to your severance letter, made you redundant.

That's the week in tech, compressed. Last month it happened to nearly 40,000 people.

Tech layoffs hit their highest single month in two years, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. For the third month running, AI was the most-cited reason for job cuts — across every industry, not just software. The story writes itself: the machines got good, the humans got expensive, somebody had to go.

Except a lot of the people who actually run these companies don't believe their own story.

Take Block. Jack Dorsey cut nearly half the company this year, then framed it as AI “fundamentally” changing what it means to build and run a company. Pressed on X about the bloat he'd created during the pandemic, he admitted the quiet part: Block had overhired. Marc Andreessen — not exactly an AI skeptic — called the technology the “silver bullet excuse” for cuts. His estimate is that most large companies are overstaffed by 50%, some by 75%, and every one of them now has cover. “Ah, it's AI.”

Here's the part that turns an ordinary layoff cycle into a powder keg.

While the pink slips went out, a small group got rich in ways most people won't see in a lifetime. Cerebras went public last month and closed its first day up 68% from a $185 share price — a $67 billion valuation, the biggest U.S. tech IPO since Snowflake in 2020. Two co-founders were billionaires by the closing bell. Then SpaceX went public on Friday at a $2.1 trillion market cap, turning Elon Musk into a paper trillionaire and minting an estimated 4,400 millionaires and 400 centimillionaires in a single afternoon. Anthropic and OpenAI are next in line, both circling $1 trillion.

Now stack that against the other America. Health premiums are up 6–7% this year, double the rate of inflation. Three out of four Americans now name the cost of living as their top economic worry, up from 58% just a year ago. And in March, two months before Meta laid off 8,000 people, Mark Zuckerberg bought a $170 million mansion on Miami's “Billionaire Bunker” — the most expensive home sale in Miami-Dade history.

Read those last two sentences back to back. That's the optics problem nobody in a corner office wants to say out loud.

My Opinion

I'll be blunt: “AI did it” is the most convenient lie in corporate America right now, and the executives saying it know better. The proof is in the stock chart. When Block, Atlassian, and Cloudflare blamed cuts on AI, their shares went up. That's not a productivity story — it's a permission slip. Wall Street is paying companies to fire people and credit a chatbot, so they do.

What bugs me most is the dishonesty. If you overhired during the pandemic, say so. If tariffs and economic uncertainty are making you cautious — which is what economists keep pointing to — say that. Instead the industry gets to look visionary while it guts payroll, and the laid-off worker gets told a robot was simply better. It's a story engineered to make the person feel obsolete instead of cheated.

2008 gave us Occupy Wall Street, and that anger was about who paid to clean up a crash. There's no crash this time. Companies are profitable, the fortunes are real, and the firings are happening anyway. When the next downturn arrives — and valuations this stretched guarantee one will — the people who lost their jobs will remember exactly who was buying mansions while they updated their resumes. That bill always comes due.

Author: Yahor Kamarou (Mark) / www.humai.blog / 17 Jun 2026