This move comes on the back of record quarterly earnings, which begs the question: is Big Tech turning layoffs into a business model?
There is a number that should give everyone pause: $15.8 billion. That is what Cisco Systems earned in a single quarter, its best quarterly revenue ever. And on the very same day it announced that figure to the world, it also announced it was cutting nearly 4,000 jobs.
Ponder that for a moment.
This was not a company in distress. This was not a firm scrambling to stay afloat, making painful decisions to survive a downturn. Cisco’s CEO Chuck Robbins told employees in an internal memo that the companies which will win the AI era are those with “focus, urgency, and the discipline to continuously shift investment toward the areas where demand and long-term value creation are strongest.” In other words: record profits were not enough. There are new bets to place. And someone else would be paying the price.
Within 24 hours, LinkedIn followed suit. The Microsoft-owned professional networking platform, which had just crossed $5 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time and reported 12% year-on-year growth, informed roughly 875 employees, about 5% of its global workforce, that their roles were being eliminated. CEO Daniel Shapero’s internal memo cited the need for “a flatter organisational structure” and a shift of resources toward growing parts of the business. A company spokesperson, with the kind of corporate restraint that can make your teeth ache, called it “regular business planning.”
Two companies. Two record-breaking quarters. Two rounds of layoffs. Same week.
What we are witnessing is not a correction, not a restructuring in the classic sense, and certainly not a necessity. It is the maturation of a playbook that Big Tech has been refining for several years now: use healthy earnings as a launchpad to fund the next wave of AI infrastructure, and use workforce reductions as the mechanism to free up that capital. The financial logic is impeccable. The human logic is something else entirely.
The numbers at a sector level are staggering. By 13 May 2026, the global technology industry had already announced over 103,000 layoffs this year, averaging roughly 880 a day. That figure is approaching the total for all of 2025, and we are barely past the midpoint of the second quarter. Meta is preparing to cut 8,000 employees on 20 May, per reports. Oracle has eliminated up to 30,000 positions. Cloudflare announced more than 1,100 cuts this week alone. The industry is not contracting. It is reshaping, and it is doing so on the backs of people who, in many cases, helped build the very revenues now being celebrated.
What makes the Cisco case particularly galling is the math. The company’s restructuring programme is expected to cost approximately $1 billion over two fiscal years, with $450 million of that absorbed in the current quarter alone. They are, in effect, spending a billion dollars to fire people while sitting on record revenues. The SEC filing makes for instructive reading: clinical, procedural, stripped of any acknowledgment that human beings are on the other side of those line items.
For LinkedIn, the irony runs even deeper. This is a platform whose entire identity is built around professional growth, careers, and the future of work. Its homepage, at any given moment, is full of posts about resilience, leadership, and how to navigate uncertain times. Now its own employees are navigating those uncertain times, likely using LinkedIn to update their profiles and signal to the market that they are open to opportunities.
To be fair, both companies insist the layoffs are not AI-driven in the direct sense, that robots are not replacing these specific workers. At LinkedIn, a source explicitly told Reuters the cuts were not about AI substitution. But that framing misses the point. The layoffs may not be AI-caused, but they are absolutely AI-funded. The capital freed up by these cuts flows directly into AI infrastructure, AI product development, and AI partnerships. The workers leaving are subsidising the machines arriving.
The phrase “late-stage capitalism” gets thrown around loosely, but moments like this give it genuine descriptive weight. We have arrived at a point where corporate success and corporate accountability have been fully decoupled. A company can post its best quarter in history and cut thousands of jobs in the same breath, and the market will reward it. Shareholders will cheer. Analysts will note the improved cost structure. And somewhere in San Jose or Sunnyvale, 875 or 4,000 people will be quietly clearing out their desks.
This is the machine in full motion. Profitable, efficient, and entirely indifferent to human costs while maximising the revenue flywheel.
