Big Tech Fired 25,000 People to Buy More AI and a Bigger Yacht

25,000 jobs got Thanos-snapped in one quarter and Mark Zuckerberg basically said, “skill issue.”

Meta, Google, and Amazon spent the last few months doing what they do best: deleting humans to fund PowerPoints about “the future.” Meta alone reportedly chopped 12,000 roles — including a ton of engineers — while backing up the money truck for AI.

Meta calls it “efficiency.”

Zuck’s “no room for underperformers” line is cute, considering the entire Metaverse era was basically a $10B VR screensaver nobody asked for. But sure, tell a 26-year-old backend engineer they’re the problem while your company tries to reinvent Clippy as God.

The cruel part is who gets smoked: younger workers. Less political armor, fewer internal allies, smaller severance packages, and they’re the easiest to label “not a culture fit” when leadership needs a sacrificial offering to Wall Street.

Meanwhile Amazon and Google keep trimming too, because nothing says “we’re thriving” like firing thousands of people while executive comp continues to levitate like it’s filled with helium and human suffering.

If you work in tech, this is the new deal: you’re not an employee, you’re a quarterly expense line with a face. If you don’t work in tech, congrats — this is still your problem, because when high-paid workers flood the job market, wages everywhere get punched in the mouth.