Microsoft’s Satya Nadella says job cuts have been ‘weighing heavily’ on him
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talks with Indonesia’s Minister of Communication and Information Technology Budi Arie Setiadi, on the day of their meeting with Indonesian President Joko WIdodo, at the Presidential Palace in Jakarta, Indonesia, April 30, 2024.
Willy Kurniawan | Reuters
Microsoft has laid off over 15,000 people so far in 2025. The stress of the belt-tightening has gotten to CEO Satya Nadella.
“Before anything else, I want to speak to what’s been weighing heavily on me, and what I know many of you are thinking about: the recent job eliminations,” Nadella wrote in a memo to employees Thursday.
After Microsoft’s latest labor reductions, investors pushed the stock’s closing price above $500 for the first time on July 9. The company announced the layoffs of about 9,000 people a week earlier. Microsoft employed 228,000 people as of June 2024. It hasn’t provided a new figure that takes into account its layoffs this year, but Nadella wrote that headcount is basically flat.
“This is the enigma of success in an industry that has no franchise value,” he wrote. “Progress isn’t linear. It’s dynamic, sometimes dissonant, and always demanding. But it’s also a new opportunity for us to shape, lead through, and have greater impact than ever before.”
The cuts at Microsoft are reflective of an overall trend across the tech industry, with over 80,000 positions eliminated to date in 2025, according to one count. Recruit Holdings announced earlier this month that it would lay off 1,300 people from its human resources technology segment that includes the Indeed and Glassdoor websites. The company’s CEO pointed to artificial intelligence in a memo, Bloomberg reported.
On social media in recent months, some Microsoft employees have become disheartened about the company’s cutbacks, given its stature.
“I have loved working for this company, still do, but this has done so much damage to that loyalty because it has shown that Microsoft’s espoused values do not apply to business decisions at the macro level,” a person who lists themselves as a Microsoft directed on LinkedIn posted last week.
Microsoft is the world’s most valuable public company after Nvidia, whose chips have become a critical piece of the AI arms race. Microsoft’s Windows and Office franchises remain dominant, and its Azure cloud services have seen faster growth in recent years as OpenAI and other companies rent out Nvidia graphics cards to run AI models.
In the memo, Nadella touched on Microsoft’s mission for the past 10 years, which has been to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, and how the rise of AI is changing it.
“We must reimagine our mission for a new era,” he wrote. “What does empowerment look like in the era of AI? It’s not just about building tools for specific roles or tasks. It’s about building tools that empower everyone to create their own tools. That’s the shift we are driving — from a software factory to an intelligence engine empowering every person and organization to build whatever they need to achieve.”
Microsoft reports fiscal fourth-quarter results on Wednesday.
WATCH: Microsoft poaches more Google DeepMind AI talent as AI talent wars continue
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes a keynote speech during the Meta Connect annual event, at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.
Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday said Shengjia Zhao, the co-creator of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, will serve as the chief scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs.
Zuckerberg has been on a multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence hiring blitz in recent weeks, highlighted by a $14 billion investment in Scale AI. In June, Zuckerberg announced a new organization called Meta Superintelligence Labs that’s made up of top AI researchers and engineers.
Zhao’s name was listed among other new hires in the June memo, but Zuckerberg said Friday that Zhao co-founded the lab and “has been our lead scientist from day one.” Zhao will work directly with Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI who is acting as Meta’s chief AI officer.
“Shengjia has already pioneered several breakthroughs including a new scaling paradigm and distinguished himself as a leader in the field,” Zuckerberg wrote in a social media post. “I’m looking forward to working closely with him to advance his scientific vision.”
In addition to co-creating ChatGPT, Zhao helped build OpenAI’s GPT-4, mini models, 4.1 and o3, and he previously led synthetic data at OpenAI, according to Zuckerberg’s June memo.
Meta Superintelligence Labs will be where employees work on foundation models such as the open-source Llama family of AI models, products and Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research projects.
The social media company will invest “hundreds of billions of dollars” into AI compute infrastructure, Zuckerberg said earlier this month.
“The next few years are going to be very exciting!” Zuckerberg wrote Friday.
WATCH: Meta announces massive ‘Prometheus’ & ‘Hyperion’ data center plans
Technology
Palantir joins list of 20 most valuable U.S. companies, with stock more than doubling in 2025
Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies, speaks on a panel titled Power, Purpose, and the New American Century at the Hill and Valley Forum at the U.S. Capitol on April 30, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images
Palantir has hit another major milestone in its meteoric stock rise. It’s now one of the 20 most valuable U.S. companies.
The provider of software and data analytics technology to defense agencies saw its stock rise more than 2% on Friday to another record, lifting the company’s market cap to $375 billion, which puts it ahead of Home Depot and Procter & Gamble. The company’s market value was already higher than Bank of America and Coca-Cola.
Palantir has more than doubled in value this year as investors ramp up bets on the company’s artificial intelligence business and closer ties to the U.S. government. Since its founding in 2003 by Peter Thiel, CEO Alex Karp and others, the company has steadily accrued a growing list of customers.
Revenue in Palantir’s U.S. government business increased 45% to $373 million in its most recent quarter, while total sales rose 39% to $884 million. The company next reports results on Aug. 4.
Earlier this year, Palantir soared ahead of Salesforce, IBM and Cisco into the top 10 U.S. tech companies by market cap.
Buying the stock at these levels requires investors to pay hefty multiples. Palantir currently trades for 273 times forward earnings, according to FactSet. The only other company in the top 20 with a triple-digit ratio is Tesla at 175.
With $3.1 billion in total revenue over the past year, Palantir is a fraction the size of the next smallest company by sales among the top 20 by market cap. Mastercard, which is valued at $518 billion, is closest with sales over the past four quarters of roughly $29 billion.
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