Moonshot Minute

Jensen Huang, whose company sells the chips this entire AI boom runs on, called CEOs who blame AI for layoffs lazy. The man selling the shovels says you are not actually digging. Microsoft cut 4,800 roles. Oracle cut 21,000. Cloudflare, GitLab, Meta, Cisco — the list keeps growing. Record revenue, record cuts. AI washing is the new corporate cover story. June payrolls added 57,000 jobs — less than...

Microsoft cut 4,800 jobs this week. Xbox took the biggest hit. 3,200 roles. Four game studios being spun off or sold. The June Challenger report shows AI was the leading cause of layoffs for the fourth straight month. Over 101,000 AI-linked cuts in 2026. Here is what the press releases skip. Firms that cut headcount after AI pilots are not seeing the returns they expected. If you are a founder try...

850,000 fireworks lit up the National Mall. A nine-hour military flyover. The Salute to America celebration cost $103 million. The parade for ordinary people? Canceled because of an around 115-degree heat index. But that's not the story. The story is the spreadsheet behind the spectacle. The President's financial disclosure shows 327 stock purchases on the day before a tariff pause that se...

The jobs report dropped today. 57,000 jobs added in June. Economists expected 115,000. A 67 percent miss. Wall Street celebrated anyway. Here is what the headlines are not telling you. The numbers you are reading are probably wrong. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has overcounted nearly 3 million jobs over the past three years. The agency's survey response rates have collapsed. The data is revi...

British American Tobacco announced 9,000 job cuts this week. The CEO called it building a "future-ready organization." AI got the credit. Here is what the press release did not tell you. Of those 9,000 roles, 5,500 are actual cuts. The other 3,500 are being handed to Accenture and other outsourcers. That is not AI taking a job. That is the same job, moved somewhere cheaper, with an AI st...

OpenAI just delayed its IPO. Anthropic pulled its most powerful models. Uber burned its entire AI budget in four months. Meta warned of billions in internal AI costs. The companies pushing AI hardest are now putting limits on it. Not on the layoffs. Over 150,000 tech workers have lost their jobs this year — 44 percent faster than last year. Mark Cuban spent this week asking: What if the AI boom co...

Oracle just admitted AI cost them 21,000 jobs. Thirteen percent of its workforce. They also warned that the cuts "may lead to shortages of sufficiently skilled employees" and "damage to employee morale and retention." The company that just cut 21,000 people is now worried it might not have enough skilled workers. That is not a contradiction. It is a confession. This episode of...

Gallup just surveyed 23,000 American workers. When laid-off employees were asked why they lost their jobs, only  one percent  said AI. That sounds like good news. It isn't. Workers who don't use AI were  three times more likely  to be laid off than those who do. In tech, the gap was even worse: 6% layoff risk for monthly AI users, 18% for everyone else. Nobody got a termination letter that...

Happy Juneteenth, everyone. Thanks for tuning in. Normally on the Moonshot Minute, we talk about AI and work and the people the headlines leave behind. But today I'm taking a different path. Today we're going to talk about Juneteenth, about the two and a half years between a proclamation and freedom actually arriving, and about what that delay tells us about how systems treat the people at...

The May jobs report was a blowout. 172,000 jobs added. Unemployment at 4.3 percent. Here is what the headlines did not tell you. Half of all industry sectors have lost jobs over the past year. The share of long-term unemployed workers rose to 27.5 percent – up from 20.4 percent a year ago. Tech layoffs have now reached nearly 150,000 people in 2026, a 44 percent increase in pace over last year. AI...

Google quietly cut its cybersecurity team this week. The stated reason? Reinvest in AI. The irony? AI amplifies the attack surface. It does not eliminate the need for security. Broader 2026 numbers tell the same story. 97,006 job cuts in May. The highest May total since 2020. For the third straight month, AI was the leading reason cited. Tech layoffs have climbed 65 percent year over year. Meanwhi...

blowout. Then the Nasdaq dropped 4.2 percent. Here is why. 60 percent of money in US stocks sits in passive funds. They don't evaluate risk. They just buy the top 10 tech names on autopilot. And those top 10 names now make up 34 percent of index profits. But the real story is circular. Google booked $29 billion in profit last quarter from marking up its stake in Anthropic — not from search, ad...

The US economy added 172,000 jobs in May. The headlines are celebrating. Here is what the headlines did not tell you. Healthcare and government carried the load. Private sector growth remains soft. Employers announced over 97,000 job cuts in May, and for the third straight month, AI was the leading cause. The uncounted are not in the BLS revisions. They are the data scientist still serving tables....

Apollo's chief economist says there is zero evidence AI is killing jobs. The layoffs are real. The AI narrative is not holding up. This is Episode 18 of Moonshot Minute. One story. No fluff. Just what's actually happening.

Last week Meta dropped the axe. 8,000 employees terminated, many getting the news at 4 AM Singapore time. Another 7,000 forcibly reassigned to AI pods. 6,000 open roles eliminated. All while Meta posts record revenue and plans to burn up to $145 billion on AI this year. When an analyst asked Zuckerberg about ROI, he called it "a very technical question" and admitted there's no precis...

May 14. Cisco reports record revenue. $15.8 billion. Then cuts 4,000 people anyway. The money isn't lost. It's moving from payroll to GPUs. Two days ago, Coinbase announced the end of "pure managers." From now on, it's player-coaches and one-person AI pods. Your boss is now your competitor. Meta's next 8,000 layoffs start tomorrow. Cloudflare cut 1,100 people and its stoc...

April's jobs report told two completely different stories — depending on where you work. Healthcare, warehousing, and retail added 115,000 jobs. Headline unemployment held steady at 4.3%. The White House called it a roaring private-sector win. Meanwhile, federal jobs are down 348,000 since late 2024. The information sector dropped another 13,000. Tech is in full efficiency-purge mode — Cloudflare...

Episode 14. Tesla's former HR chief says 80% of U.S. workers are at companies that are NOT hyperscalers. The AI panic is real, but it is concentrated.

The unemployment rate you hear about is 4.3%. The number they are not printing is 4.6% — the U‑4 rate that includes discouraged workers who have stopped looking because they believe no jobs exist. That number jumped 33% in three months. Meta is cutting 8,000 employees while spending $135 billion on AI. And a new class action says Eightfold AI is scoring applicants 0 to 5 using scraped social media...

The March jobs report added 178,000 jobs. Unemployment ticked down to 4.3 percent. The headlines called it a rebound. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics buried a number. Discouraged workers spiked by 144,000 in a single month. That's the sharpest rise in years. They stopped looking because they believe no jobs are available. Meanwhile, Snap cut 1,000 roles. GoPro slashed 23 percent. Oracle, Am...

Oracle cut 30,000 people and filed 3,126 H-1B visas in the same breath. Marc Andreessen says AI layoffs are fake. Software jobs are at a three-year high, but the people who were fired can't get them. Episode 11 unpacks the Oracle Hangover.

Oracle fired 30,000 people at 6 AM via email. Record profits. $50 billion for AI. No manager. No phone call. Just "Oracle Leadership." This is the new normal.

A developer wrote the code that trained the model. The model got good. The developer got laid off. Then Sam Altman posted: "Thank you for getting us to this point." Anthropic's study found a 61 point gap between what AI could theoretically do and what it's actually doing. Jensen Huang says companies cutting jobs are "out of imagination." And forty percent of job changers took pay cuts of more than...

OpenAI hired a manager to fix chaos. Alexey's agent wiped 1.9M rows. Scale AI: 2.5% success. Alibaba: 75% break old code. Gartner: half will rehire. The invisible infrastructure is the only thing holding it together. Episode 08.

A 47-year-old business writer posted on Reddit two weeks ago. She's been laid off three times. She's asking strangers what trade she can learn that doesn't wreck her joints and pays at least $70,000. She's not in the unemployment numbers yet. She will be. Brookings just published research on "adaptive capacity." Of the 37 million workers in high-exposure jobs, 6.1 million have almost no ability to...