Google lays off hundreds of ‘Core’ employees, moves some positions to India and Mexico
Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., during Stanford’s 2024 Business, Government, and Society forum in Stanford, California, US, on Wednesday, April 3, 2024.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Just ahead of its blowout first-quarter earnings report last week, Google laid off at least 200 employees from its “Core” teams, in a reorganization that will include moving some roles to India and Mexico, CNBC has learned.
Google’s Core unit is responsible for building the technical foundation behind the company’s flagship products and protecting users’ online safety, according to Google’s website. Core teams include key technical units from information technology, its Python developer team, technical infrastructure, security foundation, app platforms, core developers and various engineering roles.
At least 50 of the positions eliminated were in engineering at the company’s offices in Sunnyvale, California, filings show. Many of the Core teams will hire corresponding roles in Mexico and India, according to internal documents viewed by CNBC.
Asim Husain, vice president of Google Developer Ecosystem, announced some of the layoffs to his team in an email last week. He also spoke at a town hall and told employees that this was the biggest planned reduction for his team this year, an internal document shows.
“We intend to maintain our current global footprint while also expanding in high-growth global workforce locations so that we can operate closer to our partners and developer communities,” Husain wrote in the email.
Alphabet has been slashing headcount since early last year, when the company announced plans to eliminate about 12,000 jobs, or 6% of its workforce, following a downturn in the online ad market. Even with digital advertising rebounding in the past couple quarters, Alphabet has continued downsizing, with layoffs across multiple organizations this year.
CFO Ruth Porat announced in mid-April a restructuring to the company’s finance department, which included layoffs and moving positions to Bangalore and Mexico City. The company’s search boss, Prabhakar Raghavan, told employees at an all-hands meeting in March that Google plans to build teams closer to users in key markets, including India and Brazil, where labor is cheaper than in the U.S.
The latest cuts comes as the company enjoys its fastest growth rate since early 2022, alongside improving profit margins. Last week, Alphabet reported a 15% jump in first-quarter revenue from a year earlier, and announced its first-ever dividend and a $70 billion buyback.
“Announcements of this sort may leave many of you feeling uncertain or frustrated,” Husain wrote in the email to developers. He added that his message to developers is that the changes “are in service of our broader goals” as a company.
The teams involved in the reorganization have been key to the company’s developer tools, an area that’s being streamlined by Google as it incorporates more AI into the products. In February, Google announced a major rebrand of its chatbot from Bard to Gemini, the same name as the suit of AI models that power it.
Alphabet is gearing up for its annual developer conference, Google I/O, on May 14, where the company traditionally reveals new developer products and tools that have been underway during the prior year. Husain said in a memo explaining the developer changes that generative AI is at an “inflection point.”
“Recent advances in Generative AI across the industry, including Google’s Gemini, are changing the very nature of software development as we know it,” Husain wrote.
In a separate email, security engineering vice president Pankaj Rohatgi, told his team that, “In order to optimize for our business goals, we are expanding work to other locations, which will result in some role eliminations and proposed role eliminations.”
The Core layoffs also include the governance and protected data group, which will be at the center of regulatory challenges facing the company, particularly as lawmakers across the globe focus more on developments in AI. The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) went into effect in March, and is aimed at clamping down on anti-competitive practices in tech.
Evan Kotsovinos, Google’s vice president of governance and protected data, wrote about the upcoming changes in an email last week.
Kotsovinos said the team’s success means responding to “escalating regulatory focus” and is contingent on “moving faster.”
Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president overseeing search, recently referenced heightened competition, a more challenging regulatory environment and slower organic growth as the company’s “new operating reality.”
Google confirmed the Core reorganization and layoffs, and a spokesperson told CNBC that employees will be able to apply for open roles within Google and to access outplacement services.
“As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” the spokesperson said in an email. “A number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers and align their resources to their biggest product priorities.”
WATCH: Google alumni-led startups turn up pressure on top AI companies
Elon Musk (L), and Peter Navarro (R).
Reuters
As Tesla shares plummeted for a fourth straight day, CEO Elon Musk let loose on President Donald Trump’s top trade advisor Peter Navarro.
Musk, the world’s richest person, started going after Navarro over the weekend, posting on X that a “PhD in econ from Harvard is a bad thing, not a good thing,” a reference to Navarro’s degree. Whatever subtlety remained at the beginning of the week has since vanished.
On Tuesday, Musk wrote that “Navarro is truly a moron,” noting that his comments about Tesla being a “car assembler,” as much are “demonstrably false.” Musk called Navarro “dumber than a sack of bricks,” before later apologizing to bricks. Musk also called Navarro “dangerously dumb.”
Musk’s attacks on Navarro represent the most public spat between members of President Trump’s inner circle since the term began in January, and show that the steep tariffs announced last week on more than 180 countries and territories don’t have universal approval in the administration.
When asked about the feud in a briefing on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “Look, these are obviously two individuals who have very different views on trade and on tariffs.”
“Boys will be boys, and we will let their public sparring continue,” she said.
For Musk, whose younger brother Kimbal — a restaurant owner, entrepreneur and Tesla board member — has joined in on the action, the name-calling appears to be tied to business conditions.
Tesla’s stock is down 22% in the past four trading sessions and 45% for the year. Tesla has lost more tha $585 billion in value since the calendar turned, equaling tens of billions of dollars in paper losses for Musk, who is also CEO of SpaceX and the owner of xAI and social network X.
Even before President Trump detailed his plan for widespread tariffs, he’d already placed a 25% tariff on vehicles not assembled in the U.S. Many analysts said Tesla could withstand those tariffs better than competitors because its vehicles sold in the U.S. are assembled domestically.
But the company’s production costs are poised to increase because of the tariffs on materials and parts from foreign suppliers. Canada and Mexico are among the leading sources of U.S. steel imports, and Canada is the nation’s largest supplier of aluminum, while China and Mexico are home to major suppliers of printed circuit boards to the automotive industry.
At a recent an event hosted by right-wing Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, Musk said, “Both Europe and the United States should move, ideally, in my view, to a zero-tariff situation, effectively creating a free trade zone between Europe and North America.”
Musk, whose view on trade relations with Europe stands in stark contrast to the policies implemented by the president, has a vested interest in the region. Tesla has a large car factory outside of Berlin, and the European Commission previously turned to SpaceX for launches.
Even before the tariffs, Tesla’s business was faltering. Last week, the company reported a 13% year-over-year decline in first-quarter deliveries, missing analysts’ estimates. That report that landed days after Tesla’s stock price wrapped up its worst quarter since 2022.
Musk, who spent roughly $290 billion to help return Trump to the White House, is now leading the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which has slashed costs, eliminated regulations and cut tens of thousands of federal jobs. In the first quarter, Tesla was hit with waves of protests, boycotts and some criminal activity that targeted vehicles and facilities in response to Musk’s political rhetoric and his work in the White House.
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, laughs as he attends a session at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 23, 2020.
Denis Balibouse | Reuters
Apple‘s 23% plunge over the past four trading sessions has again turned Microsoft into the world’s most valuable public company.
As of Tuesday’s close, Microsoft is worth $2.64 trillion, while Apple’s market cap stands at $2.59 trillion.
While the market broadly is getting hammered by President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff plan, Apple is getting hit the hardest among tech’s megacap companies due to the iPhone maker’s reliance on China.
The Nasdaq is down 13% over the past four trading days, as President Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on imports from more than 100 countries has sparked fears of a recession brought on by rising prices. UBS analysts on Monday predicted that the price of the iPhone 16 Pro Max could jump as much as $350 in the U.S.
Both Apple and Microsoft, along with chipmaker Nvidia, were previously valued at upward of $3 trillion before the recent sell-off.
In January, Microsoft issued disappointing revenue guidance. Nevertheless, last week, as Jefferies analysts reduced their price targets on many software stocks, they wrote Microsoft was among the “companies who we view as more insulated” from tariff uncertainty.
Microsoft also had the highest market capitalization of any public company in early 2024, but Apple soon reclaimed the title.
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