Tech companies are posting record profits. They're also laying off tens of thousands of workers.
And they keep blaming the same thing: AI. A lot of people aren't buying it.
Tech firms have announced 363 rounds of layoffs this year. That has hit nearly 150,000 workers.
That's about 974 jobs a day. It's running 44% faster than last year.
Last month alone brought close to 40,000 cuts. That was the worst single month in two years.
For three months straight, AI has been the top reason firms give for the cuts.
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Here's where it gets messy. Block (XYZ) cut nearly half its staff.
Founder Jack Dorsey first said AI was changing how the company works.
Then critics pushed back. He later admitted the firm had simply over-hired.
Investor Marc Andreessen was blunter, calling AI the "silver bullet excuse" for cuts that are really about bad management.
Many economists point to other causes. The list includes tariffs, the war in the Middle East, and a shaky economy.
Fear of weak growth makes bosses cut first and explain later.
The timing is what stings. Workers are getting shown the door.
Meanwhile, a small group of AI insiders is getting rich fast.
Chipmaker Cerebras went public in May and soared 68% on its first day. The pop made its two founders billionaires almost overnight.
SpaceX went public in June, worth more than $2 trillion. The deal made Elon Musk a paper trillionaire.
And Meta (META) announced 8,000 job cuts soon after its CEO bought a $170 million home.
Anthropic and OpenAI are inching toward the stock market too. Each is worth around $1 trillion or more.
Regular folks are getting squeezed at the same time. Health premiums are up 6% to 7% this year.
That's more than double the rate of inflation.
Private health coverage costs have roughly doubled since 2008. Home prices have climbed 28% since early 2020, and mortgage rates have nearly doubled.
No surprise, then, that 76% of Americans now call the cost of living their top worry. A year ago it was 58%.
And 65% now say a middle-class life feels out of reach.
Some compare this moment to 2008. Back then, anger at Wall Street grew into the Occupy Wall Street protests.
The worry now is simple. One group is getting rich off the very tech blamed for the other group's job loss.
There's a reason the AI excuse sticks around. Stocks at firms like Block, Atlassian (TEAM), and Cloudflare (NET) jumped when they blamed cuts on AI.
So the story plays well on Wall Street. The open question is whether it plays with everyone else now watching.
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