“I’m confident that Microsoft will emerge from this stronger and more competitive,” CEO Satya Nadella announced in a memo to employees that was posted on the company website Wednesday. Some employees will find out this week if they’re losing their jobs, he wrote.
Amazon: 18,000 jobs cut
Earlier this month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company was planning to lay off more than 18,000 employees, primarily in its human resources and stores divisions. It came after Amazon said in November it was looking to cut staff, including in its devices and recruiting organizations. CNBC reported at the time that the company was looking to lay off about 10,000 employees.
Amazon went on a hiring spree during the Covid-19 pandemic. The company’s global workforce swelled to more than 1.6 million by the end of 2021, up from 798,000 in the fourth quarter of 2019.
Alphabet (Verily): 230 jobs cut
Google parent company Alphabet had largely avoided layoffs until January, when it cut 15% of employees from Verily, its health sciences division. Google itself has not undertaken any significant layoffs as of Jan. 18, but employees are increasingly growing worried that the ax may soon fall.
Crypto.com: 500 jobs cut
Crypto.com announced plans to lay off 20% of its workforce Jan. 13. The company had 2,450 employees, according to PitchBook data, suggesting around 490 employees were laid off.
CEO Kris Marszalek said in a blog post that the crypto exchange grew “ambitiously” but was unable to weather the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire FTX without the further cuts.
“All impacted personnel have already been notified,” Marszalek said in a post.
The exchange plans to cut 950jobs, according to a blog post. Coinbase, which had roughly 4,700 employees as of the end of September, had already slashed 18% of its workforce in June saying it needed to manage costs after growing “too quickly” during the bull market.
“With perfect hindsight, looking back, we should have done more,” CEO Brian Armstrong told CNBC in a phone interview at the time. “The best you can do is react quickly once information becomes available, and that’s what we’re doing in this case.”
In a letter to employees, co-CEO Marc Benioff said customers have been more “measured” in their purchasing decisions given the challenging macroeconomic environment, which led Salesforce to make the “very difficult decision” to lay off workers.
Salesforce said it will record charges of $1 billion to $1.4 billion related to the headcount reductions, and $450 million to $650 million related to the office space reductions.
Meta‘s disappointing guidance for the fourth quarter of 2022 wiped out one-fourth of the company’s market cap and pushed the stock to its lowest level since 2016.
The tech giant’s cuts come after it expanded headcount by about 60% during the pandemic. The business has been hurt by competition from rivals such as TikTok, a broad slowdown in online ad spending and challenges from Apple’s iOS changes.
Twitter: 3,700 jobs cut
Lyft: 700 jobs cut
Lyftannounced in November that it cut 13% of its staff, or about 700 jobs. In a letter to employees, CEO Logan Green and President John Zimmer pointed to “a probable recession sometime in the next year” and rising ride-share insurance costs.
For laid-off workers, the ride-hailing company promised 10 weeks of pay, health care coverage through the end of April, accelerated equity vesting for the Nov. 20 vesting date and recruiting assistance. Workers who had been at the company for more than four years will get an extra four weeks of pay, they added.
CEO Patrick Collison wrote in a memo to staff that the cuts were necessary amid rising inflation, fears of a looming recession, higher interest rates, energy shocks, tighter investment budgets and sparser startup funding. Taken together, these factors signal “that 2022 represents the beginning of a different economic climate,” he said.
Stripe was valued at $95 billion last year, and reportedly lowered its internal valuation to $74 billion in July.
In a memo to staff, CEO Tobi Lutke acknowledged he had misjudged how long the pandemic-driven e-commerce boom would last, and said the company is being hit by a broader pullback in online spending. Its stock price is down 78% in 2022.
Netflix: 450 jobs cut
Netflix announced two rounds of layoffs. In May, the streaming service eliminated 150 jobs after the company reported its first subscriber loss in a decade. In late June, it announced another 300 layoffs.
In a statement to employees, Netflix said, “While we continue to invest significantly in the business, we made these adjustments so that our costs are growing in line with our slower revenue growth.”
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel told employees in a memo that the company needs to restructure its business to deal with its financial challenges. He said the company’s quarterly year-over-year revenue growth rate of 8% “is well below what we were expecting earlier this year.”
Robinhood: 1,100 jobs cut
Retail brokerage firm Robinhood slashed 23% of its staff in August, after cutting 9% of its workforce in April. Based on public filings and reports, that amounts to more than 1,100 employees.
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev blamed “deterioration of the macro environment, with inflation at 40-year highs accompanied by a broad crypto market crash.”
“Tesla will be reducing salaried headcount by 10% as we have become overstaffed in many areas,” Musk wrote. “Note this does not apply to anyone actually building cars, battery packs or installing solar. Hourly headcount will increase.”
Xreal said its Project Aura glasses will run Google Android XR.
Xreal
Xreal on Tuesday announced a set of so-called “extended reality” glasses that run Google’s Android XR software, as the companies look to take on Meta and Apple in a new arena.
The launch marks an early step from Alphabet‘s Google to become a major operating system for future virtual and augmented reality smart glasses and headsets, much like Android has turned into a default option for most smartphones.
Xreal, a Chinese company backed by Alibaba, calls its glasses Project Aura and describes them as a lightweight extended reality — or XR — product. XR is a broad term encompassing technologies that merge real and virtual worlds.
Android XR, Google’s operating system for these products, was launched last year and is infused with its AI assistant Gemini.
Samsung’s Project Moohan, a type of headset that looks to rival Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro, was the first device announced that runs Android XR. Samsung plans to launch the hardware this year.
Xreal’s Project Aura is the second device announced that will operate on Android XR, and it is the first such device in the glasses format.
Few details have been released about the tech, which was announced at the Google I/O conference. Xreal said the glasses will have Qualcomm‘s Snapdragon XR chips, which are specially designed for these pieces of hardware.
Xreal also said the glasses will be “tethered,” meaning they will connect to another device to run. The company has not yet provided details on what the glasses will need to be linked to.
The startup has released previous products that have run its in-house operating system, featured its own chips and connected to its own second device. But Project Aura will now rely more heavily on Google’s software and on Qualcomm semiconductors.
The timeline and price of Project Aura were not immediately disclosed. Xreal will likely release a headset for developers to start experimenting and building apps first, then a consumer product at a later date.
For Google, the more devices that run Android XR, the more appealing it will be for developers to build apps for the operating system. A large part of any operating system’s success is the quality of apps available for users.
For Xreal, being an early partner with Google and working with Qualcomm will give it access to the latest technology in the XR space, as well as to marketing for its products.
Glasses also offer an alternative to bulky headsets. Tech giants including Apple and Meta see extended reality as a potential new paradigm in computing.
Palo Alto Networks signage displays on the screen at the Nasdaq Market in New York City, U.S., March 25, 2025.
Jeenah Moon | Reuters
Palo Alto Networks reported better-than-expected earnings and revenue for the latest quarter but its gross margin was below estimates. The stock dropped 4% in extended trading on Tuesday.
Here’s how the company did, compared to analysts’ consensus estimates from LSEG:
Earnings per share: 80 cents, adjusted vs. 77 cents expected
Revenue: $2.29 billion vs. $2.28 billion expected
Sales in the company’s fiscal third-quarter grew 15% from $1.98 billion a year earlier. Net income fell to $262.1 million, or 37 cents per share, from $278.8 million, or 39 cents per share, a year ago.
The company said its fourth-quarter adjusted earnings will come be between 87 cents and 89 per share, ahead of analysts estimates of 86 cents.
Palo Alto Networks said that its non-GAAP gross margin was 76%, which trailed analysts’ estimates of 77.2%.
The company said capital expenditures for its latest quarter were $68.3 million, below Wall Street estimates of $70.8 million.
Elon Musk interviews on CNBC from the Tesla Headquarters in Texas.
CNBC
Elon Musk said Tuesday that he expects Tesla and xAI will continue buying chips from semiconductor giants Nvidia and AMD, and possibly others.
Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, which now owns X (formerly Twitter) has already installed 200,000 GPUs at its Colossus facility in Memphis, the Tesla CEO told CNBC’s David Faber on Tuesday. XAI is also planning a 1 million GPU facility outside of Memphis, Musk said.
He did not specify how many chips the company had already ordered and by which date they may be installed.
“A few years ago, I made a very obvious prediction, which is that the limitation on AI will be chips,” he said.
At his autos business, Tesla, Musk said the company’s Dojo supercomputer in Buffalo, New York is already used for training its Autopilot and Optimus robotics systems.
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