Whenever a company makes layoffs, the announcements tend to be corporate-speak at their most sanitized—bloodless at best. The language is heavily vetted for legal and reputational risk to make sure they’re legally ironclad and purposefully anodyne. Or at least that was what this grim tradition looked like in the era before executives began discussing AI-induced workforce cuts.
On May 19, Bill Winters, a chief executive at Standard Chartered Group, told a roomful of investors that AI is replacing “lower-value human capital” at the firm, which announced cuts of 15 percent by 2030. These layoffs weren’t a cost-cutting initiative: Standard Chartered hit its 2026 medium-term financial goals a year ahead of schedule. This move was just a pure replacement of human talent for its AI equivalent.
Winters later apologized for the remarks on LinkedIn, which he said “caused upset to some colleagues.”
Weeks after Winters’ comments, WiseTech Global co-founder Richard White told a conference crowd that “it doesn’t take much effort to convince people … that they’re stupid to be paying $100 for labor when you can pay $2 for the AI.” Its CEO, Zubin Appoo, received a “hand-written threat of violence” containing his personal information and comments about his family.
The reaction was outsize and incendiary—all the same, CEO language on AI and layoffs seems to be purposely brutal. The performative brashness on display is not an accident; it serves two aims. First, it signals to Wall Street that these companies are serious about AI, which in turn boosts shareholder value. Next, it broadcasts to peers that they’re willing to talk tough on layoffs, as well. It also communicates something more insidious: With workers having less bargaining power than they’ve had in a generation, this language demonstrates just how far removed executives are from their employees.
“The tech sector, which is currently flush with investment and capital, is the ultimate example of this taken to the extremes,” said Dennis Tourish, a professor of leadership and organization studies at the University of Sussex. “With all of the money flowing into AI companies in particular at the moment, they are acquiring more and more power.”
The more severe these layoff proclamations are, the more investors notice. Cisco’s stock price jumped 13 percent after it announced 4,000 job cuts, which were “not a savings-driven restructure,” according to CFO Mark Patterson. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced plans to lay off 14 percent of its staff on X, citing the “need to return to the speed and focus of our startup founding, with AI at our core.” The company’s stock price rose 4 percent during premarket trading. AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI, whose CEOs forecast double-digit unemployment and that entire job categories will be “totally, totally gone,” are both racing toward IPOs.
CEOs making bold statements that drive markets—and alienate employees and the general public—may have behavioral roots that come with the role.
Robert Sutton, a professor of management science at Stanford University, refers to this as the “toxic tandem”: Executives stop paying attention to those below them in favor of tracking the company’s stock price. Executives eventually only look upward, be it to please their boards or to shape market movements.
“People look up the hierarchy rather than down the hierarchy,” Sutton says. “That’s what baboons do, too.”
The primate dominance metaphor is apt. CEOs are often in conversation through these statements, often as a form of competition.
Executives across industries don’t just look up the hierarchy, they may also parrot what their peers do. “You can never underestimate the extent to which corporate behavior is imitative,” says Tourish. “Laying people off then becomes a fad—a craze.”
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk made major cuts at X in 2023, saying the company had “a lot of people that didn’t seem to have a lot of value.” Musk challenged other companies to do the same, asserting that significant cuts wouldn’t negatively impact productivity. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made 21,000 cuts the same year. Salesforce head Mark Benioff went from being skeptical of AI layoffs in 2025 to cutting 4,000 customer support roles six weeks later. He slashed another 1,000 employees in March 2026.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince outlined which category of workers he’d made “obsolete” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Block CEO Jack Dorsey cut the company’s workforce nearly in half while bragging that AI was enabling “a fundamentally new way of working.” Mark Zuckerberg parked his $300 million mega-yacht (and two support ships) in Seattle on the same day Meta cut 1,400 employees earlier this month.
The loudest Silicon Valley voices come from a culture that has long rewarded the perpetuation of cruelty. Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was known for being mercurial—and for being often imitated by his peers. Zuckerberg considered him “a mentor and a friend.” Musk called him “an incredible guy” with “a certain magic about him.” That “magic” may have been admired by Big Tech’s ruling elites, but it didn’t benefit those beneath Jobs on the org chart very much.
“Steve Jobs was one of the most gifted people I’ve ever seen in terms of building and designing products. He was also one of the biggest assholes I’ve ever seen in how he treated people,” says Sutton. Apple’s shareholder returns also averaged 33.6 percent per year during his tenure.
The language of “hard choices” and “difficult decisions” doesn’t convey enough strength anymore. Only aggression does that. But this posturing among CEOs comes at a cost, be it from employee burnout—or threats against their safety.
“When you treat people badly and they either get free from you, they feel shat upon by you, or you lose power—you lose power very quickly,” Sutton says. “They shove you down because they’re lying in wait.”
