Something strange is happening in technology right now. Companies are posting record profits and earnings, laying off tens of thousands of people, citing AI as the official explanation. So far this year, there have been approx 363 dismissals at tech companies this year, hitting nearly 150,000 people — a pace of about 974 people per day, 44% faster than last year — according to TrueUp, a tech job board and recruiting platform that also runs one of the most-cited tech layoff trackers.
The trend seems to be accelerating. Redundancies hit them the highest for one month in two years last month, with nearly 40,000 layoffs, and artificial intelligence was the most-cited reason for layoffs across all industries for the third month in a row, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
There is growing skepticism that artificial intelligence is really to blame – that it is a convenient cover rather than the real cause. Few examples better illustrate the pushback than what happened at payments company Block earlier this year. After he was almost fired half of the company Earlier this year, Jack Dorsey denied that the cuts were a sign of trouble, insisting instead that AI tools “enable a new way of working that fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.” But when pressed by commentators on X about the bloat he created during the pandemic, Dorsey later admitted that Block had in fact overhired.
Other voices have also begun to weigh in, including famed venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who recently called artificial intelligence “silver bullet excuse” for layoffs that are actually related to rehiring in the pandemic era a conversation with investment podcaster Harry Stebbing, Andreessen said, “Basically every big company is overstaffed. It’s at least 25% overstaffed. I think most of the big companies are 50% overstaffed. I think a lot of them are 75% overstaffed. Now they all have a simple excuse: oh, it’s artificial intelligence.”
What happened earlier this month at Uber illustrates the ambiguity well. The company cut about 23% of its human resources division — human resources and recruiting — affecting less than 1% of its 34,000 employees, it said. A company representative clarified that the reduction has nothing to do with AI. But the announcement comes about a month after Uber’s CTO said the company had burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget in four months and had to limit the costs of individual engineers on tools like Cursor and Claude Code, because no matter what Uber says publicly, people want to connect those dots.
What makes it combustible: At the very moment when tens of thousands of workers are being shown the door, a small cohort of AI insiders is becoming rich on a scale hard to imagine.
At the beginning of last month, the chip manufacturer Cerebras Systems closed its first day on Nasdaq up 68% from an IPO price of $185, giving the chipmaker a market capitalization of about $67 billion — the biggest U.S. tech IPO since Snowflake debuted in 2020. In the end were co-founders Andrew Feldman and Sean Lee billionaires. (The company’s stock has since fallen 30%.)
Meanwhile, SpaceX went public on Friday and as of this writing has a market cap of $2.1 trillion, making Musk a paper trillionaire and potentially minting some 4,400 millionaires and 400 centimillionaires in the process – provided that the shares do not fall.
Anthropic and OpenAI are aim quickly to the public market, both valued at approximately $1 trillion or more.
Then there’s Mark Zuckerberg. In early March, he purchased a The mansion is worth 170 million dollars on the “Billionaire Bunker” in Miami, setting the all-time record for the most expensive home sold in Miami-Dade County history. Two months later, Meta announced the layoffs 8000 peopleor roughly 10% of its workforce.
It’s not just Zuckerberg; tech titans regularly shell out staggering sums for their real estate portfolios. But these extremes come at a time when many Americans are being squeezed harder than they have been in years.
Consider that employees with employer-sponsored health insurance face an increase in premiums of approximately 6% to 7% inflation has more than doubled this year, the cost of private health insurance has roughly doubled since 2008, and average house prices have risen 28% since the beginning of 2020and mortgage rates have almost doubled.
In a January 2026 New York Times/Siena poll 65% of voters said the middle-class lifestyle was unaffordable, and a more recent survey showed 76% of Americans now cite the cost of living as their top economic concern, up sharply from 58% a year earlier.
In short, it’s more than job losses in isolation. That’s tens of thousands of laid-off tech workers caught in an unusually unforgiving cost environment at the same time tens of thousands of AI insiders see once-in-a-generation paper wealth materialize and are told AI is the reason they’re out of a job. Whether or not that’s the real explanation — many economists instead point to tariffs, the Middle East war and broader economic uncertainty as the actual drivers of corporate caution — the optics are what they are. One group becomes unfathomably rich with achievements that supposedly replace the other.
It’s not hard to find precedent for what happens when that divide gets wide enough. In 2008, the financial crisis that began with unsustainable lending and excessive risk-taking on Wall Street ended with the bailouts of the banks that caused it, while millions of Americans lost their jobs and homes in the ensuing Great Recession. Three years later, that anger crystallized into Occupy Wall Street.
That move could look quaint by comparison if the current trajectory persists. Occupy Wall Street emerged from the crisis, and public anger was at its core about who paid for the cleanup. This time there is no accident to point to. Companies are profitable, AI itself mints a new category of wealth overnight, and layoffs happen anyway, and AI is called the driver. If the sentiment in 2008 was, “We’re bailing out the people who wrecked the economy while you lose your jobs,” the sentiment might end up being, “We’re getting richer than ever because of the very technology we’re using to replace you.”
Many companies — Block, Atlassian, Cloudflare, among them — have seen their shares soar when they point to AI as a reason for cuts, so the strategy makes sense on the face of it. However, they might want to think about whether that’s really the message they want to send to the people they’re firing and everyone else watching right now.
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