2024 has seen two mass layoffs at Microsoft, with 1900 staff laid off in January, before a further 650 Xbox employees were shown the door in September.
Regardless, Microsoft’s shares are up and the company’s market value is now higher than $3tn, as it works to capitalise on the rise of AI.
In case you missed it, in our broken model of civilization a CEO’s only responsibility is to increase value for shareholder. Not to clients, not to employees, not to the biosphere.
Market cap increased, job’s done successfully.
Because of layoffs, not despite them.
When I entered the work force in 2005, it was with a company that had never had a layoff in its thirty-year history.
Then, in 2009, they had their first layoff, and I learned later our CEO had taken an 80% pay raise that year.
Taxes aren’t theft. Literally firing people and taking their salaries is theft.
Also that CEO has an eminently punchable face.
Taxes are theft the specific way they are designed in most countries.
Another example of theft is a hired administrator administrating by the criterion of their own pay.
I mean, it is understandable how this works - their pay is a counterweight to the incentive to “mismanage” the company if someone else pays a fitting price. The issue here is that these two incentives do not completely neutralize each other, in some dimension their components add up.
Why I had to say that taxes are still theft - because a CEO is equivalent to a state official in this issue. It’s the same problem.
Political ideologies divide these problems, because political ideologies are like hedge funds, they diversify investments, so that every political ideology could be usable in every landscape for every policy. They are the opposite of consistent, by design.
You make zero sense and I feel dumber to have read your comment.
and I feel dumber to have read your comment
Then I have improved your self-consciousness. Thank you.
Taxes aren’t because they come from societal structure i.e agreement that we’re better off pooling resources
Is that your reading comprehension or my bad English?
It’s clearly you
OK.
The CEO is supposed to maximize the profits of investors or owners or whatever, not act like in this example.
Just like the government to which you pay taxes is supposed to use it for some public good.
Neither do what they are supposed to do, because that requires some kind of checks by a mechanism above both, and there’s no such.
Is that more clear, or have my bad English and bad explaining skills failed you again?
This is much better but your previous comment was awful. It read like a LLM alone wrote it.
That being said I can’t tell you why specifically it reads like that. I’m forwarding it to my friend who is a English professor to find out. If English is your second language then just keep at it and please don’t take the criticism here personally.
Great reply. I’m not into escalation. Only read the “taxes is theft”
OK. I further made equivalence between that CEO and the government which you charge with making use of taxes.
The entire point of AI as it stands right now is to allow more of those layoffs. Anyone telling otherwise is a liar.
Also I hate how currently, AI is used to remove the fun parts of creating things at a computer. Take coding for example, I think I can speak for many people when I say that the fun part of their job, is not the planning or the meetings, it’s the actual coding and stumbling upon a hard problem to solve. Now with AI you the human will only keep the boring parts of the job!
They should be paying 90% tax over 1 million.
Thank god, all these employees lost their jobs so Satya Nadella can pad out their already insanely high salary.
We don’t want Satya to starve like the rest us of plebs!
Typical and most people in the US view CEO’s as heroes. US income distribution is on the same level as fucking Russia.
As someone from fucking Russia, people with biggest income in your country are usually first businessmen, second - something else, while in Russia those would be cockroaches from MFA, PA and other thieves, plus a few oligarchs who at some point were among those cockroaches.
So it may not be as bad yet, but frankly yes, you are giving out vibes of going in the same direction.
“Look timmy, it’s a man made entirely of bullshit”
Pretty standard issue corporate psychopath.
An old friend was one of the people who got laid off in January. Fuck MSFT.
He made $12000 off each fired employee.
Per year. And lets not talk about his stock options and other benefits… Fucking disgusting.
CEO = SIC: Shareholder in Chief
The board doesn’t care about the number of people employed. They care about the current profitability and future profitability.
Of course that’s their job; to look after shareholder interests. And the money would move to a better investment if they didn’t.
It’s the whole system you need to change, if you seek change, not moan about an individual CEO.
That’s why Mitbestimmungsgesetz can be goddamn fucking awesome.
That would be awesome, but would have limited results if there are still a few enormous companies with patent and IP laws preventing competition.
You can’t have that eternal fight between democratic egalitarian monopoly and competitive jungle. The whole point of civilization is to have both representation and competition.
That would literally change everything for the better.
I’ve never heard of that. That’s a cool idea.
Current profitability is up. Profit margins are also up from last year. But I could see investors looking at the lack of any path after the current Xbox and wondering why they employ so many there. I’m sure other areas have also seen some stagnation.
Headline confused “despite” and “due to”
yeah lol what do they think is happening here
