With AI Booming, Corporate CEOs Are Bragging About Their Mass Layoffs

Last summer, New Yorkers played their part in a ginned-up outrage cycle after AI company Artisan plastered the city with adverts commanding employers to “Stop Hiring Humans.”  Of course this was rage-making, but in hindsight, Artisan’s stunt seems quaint. Their theatrical contempt for humanity was designed with the purpose of virality. Since then, the contempt from the business world seems to be the whole, and only, point.

On May 14, 2026, the Twitter account for ClickUp, a startup that, as far as I can tell, sells some kind of AI product management software, posted a “funny” video in which a CEO dances happily with a personified AI, while a human employee looks on in confusion. The CEO then kicks a Big Gulp into the human employee’s face and the video ends abruptly. The caption: “Every CEO right now…”

A week later, ClickUp announced it was laying off 22% of its workforce. 

The same day ClickUp posted that cringe video, Fredrik Haga, head of the crypto business Dune, announced his company would be firing a quarter of its staff to go “all-in” on AI. Just two months before, Haga had boasted that Dune just finished conducting 300 new candidate interviews, warning applicants: “If you are not hands on AImaxxxing and exploring how AI changes your domain we won’t hire you.” One wonders how many of those interviewed were fired 60 days later.

Back in February, Jack Dorsey’s fintech startup Block canned 4,000 workers. Dorsey was quick to tell us, in elder-millennial no caps typeface, “we’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving.” But AI, in his telling, forced his hand.

Meanwhile on X, Alex Finn, CEO of AI slop company CreatorBuddy, told his followers that they have “0 leverage,” that complaining about AI is just “digging your own grave,” and that anyone who doesn’t get on board the AI hype train is “filled with entitlement and only hurting you and your family.”

Meta, which more and more appears to be the corporate equivalent of the Hindenburg, has perhaps become the leading exemplar of hellish anti-workerism, as employees were told to work from home before learning of their fates via 4 AM emails. 8,000 were fired. Employees “lucky” enough to avoid the axe will have their keystrokes monitored by AI, effectively training their own replacements. On the same day as the layoffs, Zuckerberg docked his mega-yacht in a Seattle port. Perhaps unsurprisingly, morale at the evil boomer slop company that fires thousands every few months is reportedly low.

Not Just the Tech Sector

Joyful job-cutting is not limited to the tech sector. Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf, which the Times reports cut jobs every quarter of 2025, explained that his bank was finding “opportunities to do things much, much more efficiently with A.I. than humans have been doing,” and positioned himself as a truthteller, explaining that “no one wants to stand up and say that we are going to have lower head count in the future.” Four months after publicly poopooing the notion that AI would cost jobs, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan announced 1,000 layoffs obtained by “eliminating work,” explaining that “AI gives us places to go we haven’t gone.”

To the extent companies are still skeptical of replacing workers with robots, AI firms are offering incentives. Cognition, which sells a coding bot with the innocuous name Devin, will offer its product for free if the cost isn’t cheaper than paying employees.

The threat of irrelevance has allowed companies to increase their existing exploitation of workers. The “996 workweek,” outlawed in China years ago, is now the norm for many startups and established firms, as companies proudly decry the very notion of work-life balance. Insurance startups named after dog breeds boast of making employees work seven days a week, and warn that if you take weekends off, you are “quiet quitting.” One cloud storage company announced raises were cancelled, so that more money could be funneled into AI adoption. Standard Charter CEO Bill Winters may have put it best when he recently described his own workforce as “lower value human capital.”

I have no illusions about the CEO class. The “deal,” such as it is, has always been that the owners get rich at the expense of the laborers. But damn – were they always so mean about it?

A combination of AI and an economy increasingly supported by and catering to the upper class now allows the owners of capital to flaunt their power and wealth in a way they couldn’t before. We have entered a new era, one in which your punishment for the crime of having a job, and thus forcing the capitalists to shell out some sum to you biweekly, is ceaseless humiliation, boneshaking anxiety, and endless reminders that you will only pay your mortgage until they have created a robot that has no mortgage to pay.

It is truly a new phenomenon for businesses desiring expansion to not need workers to do it. During the post-war economic boom, businesses introduced pensions, health insurance, life insurance, and new perks like office parties and expense accounts to draw talent. In the ZIRP era, the same tech companies that now lubricate their gears with their employees’ tears competed to provide the most fun places to work – beer and pets at the office, unlimited PTO, on-site gyms, quick-vesting RSUs.

These times are over. AI is one reason, but it’s not only AI. Tech leaders, desperate for talent, demanded that a generation Learn To Code. Millennials and older Zoomers heeded the call, overran the market with software engineers, and now face dismal lives of struggle. To the extent that there will be perks, they will be in service of the systematic destruction of any life you may have lived outside of the office. You will not work remotely. You will be lucky to work at all.

Too Big To Fail

It is unclear, as of this writing, if businesses will still need profit to thrive, or if that is, like “having employees”, another quaint notion of yesterday. Certainly the most valuable corporations, as measured by their market caps, are years from turning profits, as is SpaceX, which just broke records for the largest IPO of all time. Nobody, at this point, expects these businesses to fail. If they did, the economy would beach like a whale, and the government will never allow that. The stock market, which has been slowly detaching from lived experience for years now, has become a full circle-jerk, powered largely by shady financing deals, phantom accounting, and implicit government guarantees.

To the extent businesses still need to make money, they have learned that if they raise prices, nobody can stop them, and the upper curve in the K-shaped economy will always be there to support them. Profit margins soared during the pandemic, and never came back down, with the evidence indicating that corporations learned that if everyone raised their prices in tandem, consumers would have nowhere else to go. This is new, another psychological barrier lying in ruins – there is now more of a brotherhood among the ownership class, a sort of loyalty among thieves, where it makes less sense to undercut your competitor than to feed at the trough right beside them.

The New York Times, in an obscene profile of Lauren Sánchez Bezos, tells us that the rich have stopped apologizing. If only all we had to worry about was a lack of remorse, and not a ruthlessly efficient machine with the sole purpose of making anyone without wealth irrelevant.