The AI layoff wave is becoming a powder keg

Something strange is happening in tech right now. Companies are posting record profits and revenue while laying off tens of thousands of people, citing AI as the official explanation. So far this year, there have been an estimated 363 layoffs at tech companies this year, affecting 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 widely cited tech layoff trackers.

Tech layoffs hit their highest single month in two years last month, with nearly 40,000 cuts, and AI was the most-cited reason for layoffs across every industry for the third month running, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Grey & Christmas.

There’s growing skepticism that AI is really the culprit, though — that it’s more of a convenient cover story than the actual cause. Few examples illustrate the pushback better than what happened at the payments outfit Block earlier this year. After getting hammered over laying off nearly half the company earlier this year, Jack Dorsey denied the cuts were a sign of trouble, insisting instead that AI tools “are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.” He also acknowledged, when pressed by commenters on X about the bloat he’d created during the pandemic, that Block had, in fact, over-hired.

Other voices have also begun to weigh in, including famed VC Marc Andreessen, who recently called AI the “silver bullet excuse” for layoffs that are really about pandemic-era overhiring. In conversation with podcaster-investor Harry Stebbings, Andreessen said, “Essentially, every large company is overstaffed. It’s at least overstaffed by 25%. I think most large companies are overstaffed by 50%. I think a lot of them are overstaffed by 75%. Now they all have the silver bullet excuse: Ah, it’s AI.”

What happened earlier this month at Uber captures the ambiguity well. The company cut about 23% of its people division — the unit HR and recruiting — affecting less than 1% of its 34,000 employees, it said. A company spokesperson specified that the cuts had nothing to do with AI. But the announcement came roughly one month after Uber’s CTO offered that the company had burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget in four months and had to cap individual engineers’ spending on tools like Cursor and Claude Code; whatever Uber said publicly, people want to connect those dots.

What makes this combustible: at the very moment that tens of thousands of workers are being shown the door, a small cohort of AI insiders is becoming wealthy on a scale that’s hard to comprehend.

Early last month, AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems closed its first day on the Nasdaq up 68% from its $185 IPO price, giving the chipmaker a market cap of roughly $67 billion — the largest US tech IPO since Snowflake’s 2020 debut. By the close, co-founders Andrew Feldman and Sean Lie were billionaires. (The company’s shares have since fallen 30%.)

SpaceX meanwhile went public on Friday and enjoys, as of this writing, a $2.1 trillion market cap, turning Musk into a paper trillionaire and potentially minting an estimated 4,400 millionaires, and around 400 centimillionaires in the process, assuming the shares don’t fall. Anthropic and OpenAI are quickly inching toward the public market, too, both at valuations of roughly $1 trillion or more.

Set against that backdrop, Mark Zuckerberg’s latest purchase takes on new meaning. In early March, he purchased a $170 million mansion on Miami’s “Billionaire Bunker” — setting the all-time record for the most expensive home sale in Miami-Dade County history. Two months later, Meta announced it would lay off 8,000 people, or roughly 10% of its workforce.

It isn’t just Zuckerberg or the other tech titans who routinely shell out jaw-dropping sums on their real estate portfolios. But these extremes come at a moment when many Americans are getting squeezed harder than they have been in years.

Workers with employer-sponsored health insurance face premium increases of about 6% to 7% this year, more than double the rate of inflation, the cost of private health insurance has roughly doubled since 2008, and median home prices have climbed 28% since early 2020, while mortgage rates have nearly doubled.

In a January 2026 New York Times/Siena poll, 65% of voters said a middle-class lifestyle is out of reach, and a May 2026 CNN/SSRS poll found 76% of Americans now name cost of living as their top economic concern, up sharply from 58% a year earlier.

This isn’t just a story about job losses in isolation, in short. It’s tens of thousands of laid-off tech workers hitting an unusually unforgiving cost environment at the same time that tens of thousands of AI insiders are seeing once-in-a-generation paper wealth materialize.

It isn’t hard to find a precedent for what happens when that divide gets wide enough. In 2008, a financial crisis that began with loose lending and over-the-top risk-taking on Wall Street ended with bailouts for the banks that caused it, while millions of Americans lost jobs and homes in the Great Recession that followed. Three years later, that anger crystallized into Occupy Wall Street.

That could look quaint in comparison if the current trajectory holds. Occupy Wall Street emerged from a crisis — banks needed rescuing, and the public anger was, at its core, about who paid for the cleanup. This time, there’s no crash to point to. Companies are profitable, AI itself is minting a new class of overnight fortunes, and the layoffs are happening anyway, with AI cited as the reason. If the optics of 2008 were, “We’re bailing out the people who broke the economy while you lose your job,” the optics here could end up being, “We’re getting richer than ever, off the very tech we’re using to replace you.”

Many companies — Block, Atlassian, Cloudflare, among them — have watched their stocks surge when they point to AI, so the strategy is understandable. Still, they might want to consider whether that’s really the message they want to send to the people they’re laying off, and to everyone else now watching.