Spotify announced Monday it’s cutting 6% of its global workforce as the music streaming company contends with a gloomy economic environment that has seen consumers and advertisers alike limit their spending.
Spotify has a total workforce of around 9,800 people, which means the cuts impact about 600 employees. According to its LinkedIn profile, the company employs 5,400 people in the U.S. and 1,900 in Sweden.
Spotify, which is based in Sweden but listed on the New York Stock Exchange, sent an internal memo to staff Monday announcing the layoffs.
One-on-one conversations with affected employees will begin over the next several hours, Daniel Ek, Spotify’s CEO, wrote in the note, which was posted publicly on the company’s website.
“Like many other leaders, I hoped to sustain the strong tailwinds from the pandemic and believed that our broad global business and lower risk to the impact of a slowdown in ads would insulate us,” Ek said.
“In hindsight, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth. And for this reason, today, we are reducing our employee base by about 6% across the company.”
Ek said in the note to employees that he takes “full accountability for the moves that got us here today.”
Laid-off employees will receive an average of five months of severance and continued health-care coverage, Ek said. Immigration support will also be available for workers whose immigration status is connected with their employment.
Dawn Ostroff, Spotify’s head of content, is also leaving the firm. Ostroff, a former president of Conde Nast Entertainment, joined Spotify in 2018 to help the company grow its fledgling advertising and podcasting businesses.
In her time at Spotify, Ostroff signed Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company Higher Ground Productions to have the former U.S. president and first lady work on exclusive podcasts for Spotify. She also led the deal to get exclusive rights to the Joe Rogan show and was responsible for negotiating exclusive podcasting deals with Kim Kardashian, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
“Because of her efforts, Spotify grew our podcast content by 40x, drove significant innovation in the medium and became the leading music and podcast service in many markets,” Ek said in the memo Monday.
On Friday, Google became the latest major tech name to announce layoffs, saying it plans to cut 12,000 employees. Microsoft and Amazon, meanwhile, have also announced layoffs.
Tech firms faced a reckoning in 2022 as interest rate hikes from the U.S. Federal Reserve made shares a less attractive bet for investors.
Here’s the full memo Ek sent to Spotify staff:
Team,
As we say in our Band Manifesto, change is the only constant. For this reason, I continue to reiterate that speed is the most defensible strategy a business can have. But speed alone is not enough. We must also operate with efficiency. It’s these two things together that will fuel our long-term success. With this in mind, I have some important news to share today.
While we have made great progress in improving speed in the last few years, we haven’t focused as much on improving efficiency. We still spend far too much time syncing on slightly different strategies, which slows us down. And in a challenging economic environment, efficiency takes on greater importance. So, in an effort to drive more efficiency, control costs, and speed up decision-making, I have decided to restructure our organization.
To start, we are fundamentally changing how we operate at the top. To do this, I will be centralizing the majority of our engineering and product work under Gustav as Chief Product Officer and the business areas under Alex as Chief Business Officer. I’m happy to say that Gustav and Alex, who have been with Spotify for a long time and have done great work, will be leading these teams as co-presidents, effectively helping me run the company day-to-day. They’ll tell you more about what this means in the coming days, but I’m confident that with their leadership, we’ll be able to achieve great things for Spotify.
Personally, these changes will allow me to get back to the part where I do my best work—spending more time working on the future of Spotify—and I can’t wait to share more about all the things we have coming.
As a part of this change, Dawn Ostroff has decided to depart Spotify. Dawn has made a tremendous mark not only on Spotify, but on the audio industry overall. Because of her efforts, Spotify grew our podcast content by 40x, drove significant innovation in the medium and became the leading music and podcast service in many markets. These investments in audio offered new opportunities for music and podcast creators and also drove new interest in the potential of Spotify’s audio advertising. Thanks to her work, Spotify was able to innovate on the ads format itself and more than double the revenue of our advertising business to €1.5 billion. We are enormously grateful for the pivotal role she has played and wish her much success. In the near term, Dawn will assume the role of senior advisor to help facilitate this transition. Alex will take on the responsibility for the content, advertising and licensing work going forward and you’ll hear more from him on that.
The need to become more efficient That brings me to the second update. As part of this effort, and to bring our costs more in line, we’ve made the difficult but necessary decision to reduce our number of employees.
Over the next several hours, one-on-one conversations will take place with all impacted employees. And while I believe this decision is right for Spotify, I understand that with our historic focus on growth, many of you will view this as a shift in our culture. But as we evolve and grow as a business, so must our way of working while still staying true to our core values.
To offer some perspective on why we are making this decision, in 2022, the growth of Spotify’s OPEX outpaced our revenue growth by 2X. That would have been unsustainable long-term in any climate, but with a challenging macro environment, it would be even more difficult to close the gap. As you are well aware, over the last few months we’ve made a considerable effort to rein-in costs, but it simply hasn’t been enough. So while it is clear this path is the right one for Spotify, it doesn’t make it any easier—especially as we think about the many contributions these colleagues have made.
Like many other leaders, I hoped to sustain the strong tailwinds from the pandemic and believed that our broad global business and lower risk to the impact of a slowdown in ads would insulate us. In hindsight, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth. And for this reason, today, we are reducing our employee base by about 6% across the company. I take full accountability for the moves that got us here today.
My focus now is on ensuring that every employee is treated fairly as they depart. While Katarina will provide more detail on all of the specifics around the ways we are committed to supporting these talented bandmates, the following will apply to all impacted employees:
Severance pay: We will start with a baseline for all employees with the average employee receiving approximately 5 months of severance. This will be calculated based on local notice period requirements and employee tenure.
PTO: All accrued and unused vacation will be paid out to any departing employee.
Healthcare: We will continue to cover healthcare for employees during their severance period.
Immigration support: For employees whose immigration status is connected with their employment, HRBPs are working with each impacted individual in concert with our mobility team.
Career Support: All employees will be eligible for outplacement services for 2 months.
What’s Next
In almost all respects, we accomplished what we set out to do in 2022 and our overall business continues to perform nicely. But 2023 marks a new chapter. It’s my belief that because of these tough decisions, we will be better positioned for the future. We have ambitious goals and nothing has changed in our commitment to achieving them.
We’ve come a long way in our efforts to build a comprehensive platform for creators of all levels, but there’s still much to be done. To truly become the go-to destination for creators, we need to keep improving our tools and technology, explore new ways to help creators engage with their audiences, grow their careers, and monetize their work.
In fact, looking at our roadmap, with the changes we are making and what we have planned to share at our upcoming Stream On event, I’m confident that 2023 will be a year where consumers and creators will see a steady stream of innovations unlike anything we have introduced in the last several years. I will share more about these exciting developments in the coming weeks.
Finally, I hope you will join me tomorrow for Unplugged.
And again, for those of you who are leaving, I thank you for everything you’ve done for Spotify and wish you every future success.
– Daniel
——-
— CNBC’s Ashley Capoot contributed to this report.
Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, has filed for an initial public offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The S1 lays the groundwork for Circle’s long-anticipated entry into the public markets.
While the filing does not yet disclose the number of shares or a price range, sources told Fortune that Circle plans to move forward with a public filing in late April and is targeting a market debut as early as June.
JPMorgan Chase and Citi are reportedly serving as lead underwriters, and the company is seeking a valuation between $4 billion and $5 billion, according to Fortune.
This marks Circle’s second attempt at going public. A prior SPAC merger with Concord Acquisition Corp collapsed in late 2022 amid regulatory challenges. Since then, Circle has made strategic moves to position itself closer to the heart of global finance — including the announcement last year that it would relocate its headquarters from Boston to One World Trade Center in New York City.
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Circle is best known as the issuer of USDC, the world’s second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization.
Pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar and backed by cash and short-term Treasury securities, USDC has roughly $60 billion in circulation.
Circle is best known as the issuer of USDC, the world’s second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization.
Pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar and backed by cash and short-term Treasury securities, USDC has roughly $60 billion in circulation. It makes up about 26% of the total market cap for stablecoins, behind Tether‘s 67% dominance. Its market cap has grown 36% this year, however, compared with Tether’s 5% growth.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said on the company’s most recent earnings call that it has a “stretch goal to make USDC the number 1 stablecoin.”
The company’s push into public markets reflects a broader moment for the crypto industry, which is navigating renewed political favor under a more crypto-friendly U.S. administration. The stablecoin sector is ramping up as the industry grows increasingly confident that the crypto market will get its first piece of U.S. legislation passed and implemented this year, focusing on stablecoins.
Stablecoins’ growth could have investment implications for crypto exchanges like Robinhood and Coinbase as they integrate more of them into crypto trading and cross-border transfers. Coinbase also has an agreement with Circle to share 50% of the revenue of its USDC stablecoin.
The stablecoin market has grown about 11% so far this year and about 47% in the past year, and has become a “systemically important” part of the crypto market, according to Bernstein. Historically, digital assets in this sector have been used for trading and as collateral in decentralized finance (DeFi), and crypto investors watch them closely for evidence of demand, liquidity and activity in the market.
More recently, however, rhetoric around stablecoins’ ability to help preserve U.S. dollar dominance – by exporting dollar utility internationally and ensuring demand for U.S. government debt, which backs nearly all dollar-denominated stablecoins – has grown louder.
A successful IPO would make Circle one of the most prominent crypto-native firms to list on a U.S. exchange — an important signal for both investors and regulators as digital assets become more entwined with the traditional financial system.
The Hims app arranged on a smartphone in New York on Feb. 12, 2025.
Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Hims & Hers Health shares closed up 5% on Tuesday after the company announced patients can access Eli Lilly‘s weight loss medication Zepbound and diabetes drug Mounjaro, as well as the generic injection liraglutide, through its platform.
Zepbound, Mounjaro and liraglutide are part of the class of weight loss medications called GLP-1s, which have exploded in popularity in recent years. Hims & Hers launched a weight loss program in late 2023, but its GLP-1 offerings have evolved as the company has contended with a volatile supply and regulatory environment.
Lilly’s weekly injections Zepbound and Mounjaro will cost patients $1,899 a month, according to the Hims & Hers website. The generic liraglutide will cost $299 a month, but it requires a daily injection and can be less effective than other GLP-1 medications.
“As we look ahead, we plan to continue to expand our weight loss offering to deliver an even more holistic, personalized experience,” Dr. Craig Primack, senior vice president of weight loss at Hims & Hers, wrote in a blog post.
A Lilly spokesperson said in a statement that the company has “no affiliation” with Hims & Hers and noted that Zepbound is available at lower costs for people who are insured for the product or for those who buy directly from the company.
In May, Hims & Hers started prescribing compounded semaglutide, the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk‘s GLP-1 weight loss medications Ozempic and Wegovy. The offering was immensely popular and helped generate more than $225 million in revenue for the company in 2024.
But compounded drugs can traditionally only be mass produced when the branded medications treatments are in shortage. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced in February that the shortage of semaglutide injections products had been resolved.
That meant Hims & Hers had to largely stop offering the compounded medications, though some consumers may still be able to access personalized doses if it’s clinically applicable.
During the company’s quarterly call with investors in February, Hims & Hers said its weight loss offerings will primarily consist of its oral medications and liraglutide. The company said it expects its weight loss offerings to generate at least $725 million in annual revenue, excluding contributions from compounded semaglutide.
But the company is still lobbying for compounded medications. A pop up on Hims & Hers’ website, which was viewed by CNBC, encourages users to “use your voice” and urge Congress and the FDA to preserve access to compounded treatments.
With Tuesday’s rally, Hims and Hers shares are up about 27% in 2025 after soaring 172% last year.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg holds a smartphone as he makes a keynote speech at the Meta Connect annual event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.
Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters
Meta’s head of artificial intelligence research announced Tuesday that she will be leaving the company.
Joelle Pineau, the company’s vice president of AI research, announced her departure in a LinkedIn post, saying her last day at the social media company will be May 30.
Her departure comes at a challenging time for Meta. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made AI a top priority, investing billions of dollars in an effort to become the market leader ahead of rivals like OpenAI and Google.
Zuckerberg has said that it is his goal for Meta to build an AI assistant with more than 1 billion users and artificial general intelligence, which is a term used to describe computers that can think and take actions comparable to humans.
“As the world undergoes significant change, as the race for AI accelerates, and as Meta prepares for its next chapter, it is time to create space for others to pursue the work,” Pineau wrote. “I will be cheering from the sidelines, knowing that you have all the ingredients needed to build the best AI systems in the world, and to responsibly bring them into the lives of billions of people.”
Vice President of AI Research and Head of FAIR at Meta Joelle Pineau attends a technology demonstration at the META research laboratory in Paris on February 7, 2025.
Stephane De Sakutin | AFP | Getty Images
Pineau was one of Meta’s top AI researchers and led the company’s fundamental AI research unit, or FAIR, since 2023. There, she oversaw the company’s cutting-edge computer science-related studies, some of which are eventually incorporated into the company’s core apps.
She joined the company in 2017 to lead Meta’s Montreal AI research lab. Pineau is also a computer science professor at McGill University, where she is a co-director of its reasoning and learning lab.
Some of the projects Pineau helped oversee include Meta’s open-source Llama family of AI models and other technologies like the PyTorch software for AI developers.
Pineau’s departure announcement comes a few weeks ahead of Meta’s LlamaCon AI conference on April 29. There, the company is expected to detail its latest version of Llama. Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, to whom Pineau reported to, said in March that Llama 4 will help power AI agents, the latest craze in generative AI. The company is also expected to announce a standalone app for its Meta AI chatbot, CNBC reported in February.
“We thank Joelle for her leadership of FAIR,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “She’s been an important voice for Open Source and helped push breakthroughs to advance our products and the science behind them.”
Pineau did not reveal her next role but said she “will be taking some time to observe and to reflect, before jumping into a new adventure.”