Amazon cuts 18 thousand employees
Cut 18,000 employees out of a total of 1.6 million people employed may almost seem like a small thing. Except, of course, that we are talking about 18,000 families who, from mid-January, will find themselves with one less salary in the United States. Yet beyond the pain of people losing jobs, there’s so much more to choosing a CEO Amazon Andy Jassy to cut 8,000 more people than tech initially expected. The reasons are the usual ones, which we have been hearing for some time now in Silicon Valley and in all those companies that orbit around new technologies: “The economy is uncertain and we have been hiring rapidly in recent times”. Too quickly, one might say.
It is as if the pandemic, after making the world run wild thanks to digital technology, has turned back the hands of time. Four years for Amazon, three for Tesla and so on. Suffice it to say that today these two companies together are worth little more than 1.3 trillion dollars, while a year ago they were well over 2 trillion. Apple has burned more than 1,000 billion dollars and the tech giants have “sacrificed” more 150 thousand jobs.
It’s just not enough. Waiting to see the opening of Wall Street, Tesla since the beginning of the year has burned 18% of its capitalization, equal to 73 billion dollars. It is like Understanding St. Paul And Unicredit together suddenly disappeared from the market in five stock exchange sessions. A meltdown. Of which, by the way, there is no end in sight. Every tech company at the moment has its own problems: Tesla is unable to meet the production targets it has set itself, also because Elon Musk is messing around on Twitter where he dispenses his pearls of wisdom.
Apple fight against scarcity chip and, while waiting for the US government to launch the maxi-plan for the production of semiconductors within the national borders, it is struggling with a greater difficulty in manufacturing its products. Microsoft holds up quite well, despite everything, while Google (sorry, alphabet) suffers dramatically from the demise of the omniscient search engine paradigm. And YouTube struggles with TikTok on a daily basis.
Meta is now a small and not very innovative company, after having dictated the pace of the entire tech sector for years. Zuckerberg he is prey to his delusions of persecution, expecting a new child and in the meantime plunges into the ranking of the super-rich in Europe. So where do tech companies have a place in all of this? Perhaps what belongs to them: a fundamental role for the world economy, but not the messianic one that has been given to them in recent years. Without industry, pharmaceuticals and other productive sectors, the world is going nowhere. With all due respect to bits and headsets for artificial intelligence.
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