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  • A Running List of the Tech CEOs Donald Trump Claims Are Calling Him to Suck Up

    A Running List of the Tech CEOs Donald Trump Claims Are Calling Him to Suck Up

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    Trump’s relationship with Apple CEO Tim Cook is one of the most congenial the former president has shared with a Silicon Valley leader. Cook maintained a relationship with Trump during his time in office, often meeting with the president and serving on advisory panels influencing policy decisions that affect Apple’s business, such as tariffs and immigration.

    Cook has not publicly confirmed that this most recent call took place. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED.

    Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg

    Shortly after the assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, this summer, the former president claimed that Zuckerberg called him. In an interview with New York magazine, Trump claimed that Zuckerberg said, “‘I will never vote for people running against you after watching what you did.’”

    A Meta spokesperson contested what Trump told the magazine, saying, “As Mark has said publicly, he’s not endorsing anybody in this race and has not communicated to anybody how he intends to vote.” (Zuckerberg did not endorse any candidate in the 2016 and 2020 elections and has said that he won’t this cycle either.)

    While Meta wouldn’t detail the contents of the call, Zuckerberg confirmed he had called Trump after the assassination attempt, calling the former president “bad ass” in July.

    “Seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life,” Zuckerberg said.

    Under Trump, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sustained countless attacks from the Trump administration and conservative lawmakers over censorship allegations. In 2020, Zuckerberg donated $350 million in pandemic support to election departments around the country. Republicans accused these “Zuckerbucks” donations of being unfairly distributed to Democratic districts. In 2021, following the January 6 riot at the Capitol, Trump was banned from Facebook and Instagram.

    Blue Origin CEO and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos

    Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has been under fire in recent days after he decided that the Washington Post would no longer endorse presidential candidates, despite the paper having a Harris endorsement in the works.

    Trump has long criticized Bezos for his ownership of the Washington Post, but Trump said that Bezos had called him after this summer’s assassination attempt. “It is the most incredible thing I’ve ever watched,” Trump said Bezos told him. “I said, ‘Despite the fact you own the Washington Post, I appreciate it.” Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, reportedly called Trump after the July shooting as well.

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  • A High-Profile Geneticist Is Launching a Fusion-Power Moonshot

    A High-Profile Geneticist Is Launching a Fusion-Power Moonshot

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    Eric Lander is a Big Science heavyweight. A geneticist, molecular biologist, and mathematician, he led the International Human Genome Project and is founding director of the powerful Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His countless accolades include a MacArthur “genius” grant and 14 honorary doctorates. When Joe Biden became president, he tapped Lander to be his science adviser and the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Lander lost the job because of charges that he bullied subordinates, but he went on to head a nonprofit organization called Science for America.

    So what is he doing running a Silicon Valley startup that aims to solve the climate crisis by realizing the long-held dream of clean fusion energy? Lander is the founding CEO of newly announced Pacific Fusion, heading a team that includes top scientists from the national nuclear labs—Lawrence Livermore and Sandia—as well as experts in simulation and operations. It joins several dozen companies chasing a fusion dream that always seems to be 10 or 20 years out. And it still is—Pacific Fusion says it won’t deliver a working commercial fusion plant until well into the 2030s. But this time there’s a clear path to success. Or so says its famous CEO.

    In May 2023, Science for America issued a report that flagged progress in fusion, citing recent breakthroughs. The year before, a Livermore group achieved what is known as “target gain,” producing significantly more energy than the amount required to perform the experiment. Soon after publishing the paper, Lander quietly formed a company with some scientists in the field, including some who worked at the labs and others from places like Alphabet’s X division and Tesla.

    Sitting in a conference room at Pacific Fusion’s headquarters in Fremont, California, Lander explains to me why commercial fusion is finally within reach—and why Pacific Fusion may have the best chance to make it happen. He starts by giving me a primer on fusion, which happens when hydrogen is, in his word, “squished” into helium, releasing massive amounts of energy. It occurs naturally on the sun and other stars, but humans have yet to figure out how to do it efficiently here on Earth. But the potential payoff—unlimited clean power—has prompted around 50 startups to chase this dragon. Billionaires including Sam Altman and Bill Gates have backed one or another of these startups. Every few months, it seems, one of those contenders announces some breakthrough.

    Why does Pacific Fusion say it’s different? The method it’s pursuing is called pulsed magnetic fusion, which involves inserting tiny containers of deuterium-tritium fuel into a chamber and blasting large electrical pulses through them to magnetically squeeze the fuel containers and achieve fusion. (It’s all explained here in a paper.) “It’s a very attractive approach that’s sort of been known for decades as an idea but has only just become feasible in the last two years because of this work in the national labs,” says Lander. His contention, which I will hear repeatedly as I meet with his team, is that we’ve now made all the scientific breakthroughs we need to understand how to use this technique to generate way more energy that it takes to build and run this system. The remaining challenges—hard ones to be sure— lie in engineering.

    Another challenge is getting the money to build the prototypes for the hundreds of commercial plants that will theoretically solve the world’s energy woes. (And maybe cause global disruption when the current suppliers are upended, but that’s another story.) How do you fund a moonshot? Even when an investor accepts the risk, the prospect for payoff is distant: The Pacific Fusion timeline is to have a full-scale demonstration system sometime in the early 2030s, and commercial systems later in the decade.

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  • OpenAI CTO Mira Murati Is Leaving the Company

    OpenAI CTO Mira Murati Is Leaving the Company

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    OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati resigned on Wednesday, saying she wants “the time and space to do my own exploration.” Murati had been among the three executives at the very top of the company behind ChatGPT, and she was briefly its leader last year while board members wrestled with the fate of CEO Sam Altman.

    “There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right,” she wrote in a message to OpenAI staff that she posted on X.

    Altman replied to Murati’s X post writing that “it’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to us all personally.” He added that he feels “personal gratitude towards her for the support and love during all the hard times.”

    A successor wasn’t immediately announced.

    Murati, through a personal spokesperson, declined to provide further comment. OpenAI also declined to comment, referring inquiries to Murati’s tweet.

    Murati previously worked at Tesla and Leap Motion before joining OpenAI in 2018. At the time, OpenAI was a small nonprofit research lab focused on developing an AI system capable of mirroring a wide range of human tasks. But in the wake of the stunning success of ChatGPT, the organization has ballooned and its focus has increasingly turned commercial. The company has been rethinking its nonprofit structure, while investors have been increasingly eager to bet billions of dollars on its future.

    OpenAI was rocked by a dramatic board coup last November that saw CEO Sam Altman removed from his post and briefly replaced by Murati. After most of the staff threatened to resign, and following pleas from investors including Microsoft, which had poured billions into the company, Altman was reinstated with an all new board.

    In the months that have followed, several of OpenAI’s leadership along with senior engineering figures have stepped away from the company. Ilya Sutskever, one of the company’s first hires, the technical brains behind much of its earlier work, and a board member who voted to remove Altman before recanting, resigned from the company in May.

    Sutskever’s departure was followed shortly after by that of Jan Leike, an engineer who led work on long-term AI safety with Sutskever. John Schulman, the engineer who took over leadership of safety work, stepped down in August. In August, Greg Brockman, a cofounder of OpenAI and a board member who stood with Altman, said he was taking a sabbatical from the company until the end of the year.

    A number of former OpenAI executives and researchers have gone on to start new AI companies. Notably, Sutskever this year launched Safe Superintelligence, which focuses on developing safe artificial intelligence. Former OpenAI research chief Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela in 2021 founded Anthropic, now one of the company’s primary rivals for customers.

    This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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  • Want to Get Into Founder Mode? You Should Be So Lucky

    Want to Get Into Founder Mode? You Should Be So Lucky

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    It’s also true that when one of those groundbreaking companies matures and faces challenges, a founder has a unique ability to make bold moves and stick to the original vision when others urge a less risky course. There are certainly cases where companies struggled when founders were replaced by managers. Remember Yahoo? And of course there’s Apple, where the founder returned and restored the company to its former glory and beyond.

    But there are abundant counterexamples as well. Apple isn’t exactly struggling under Tim Cook. And consider Microsoft. Its CEO since 2014, Satya Nadella, had been a company lifer, slogging away in various divisions since 1992. Not a founder, nope. But he’s taken the company to new heights. Though Bill Gates is still revered at Microsoft, no one in the company wants him back at the top.

    And god knows, there are plenty of cases where it wasn’t management fakers but stubborn founders who drove a company into the ground. My guess is that Travis Kalanick might have benefited from listening to stodgy managers. His replacement, a management type of dude, has made Uber profitable.

    The fact is, not everyone is Brian Chesky, and no one is like Steve Jobs. The vast majority of companies never take off, and instead fade into ignominy. Very few founders get to the point where investors demand that they retain adult supervision to manage growth, because only the rarest of companies get to that point.

    It’s fun to talk about founder mode, maybe for the same reason that some of us read Ben Horowitz’s founder-porn texts with our noses pressed to the window. Founder mode, which Graham predicts will one day get its closeup in management texts, really applies only to the most exceptional founders, the ones Steve Jobs once described as “the crazy ones.” Their companies aren’t called unicorns for nothing.

    Image may contain Label Text Symbol and Sign

    Time Travel

    In 2007, I embedded in a Y Combinator batch of 12 companies. (Starting next year there will be four batches a year, with hundreds of startups.) It was clear even then that Graham, who was extremely hands-on, had developed his views on the primacy of founders. My story ran in Newsweek under the headline “Boot Camp for Billionaires.”

    Every Tuesday during the program, Y Combinator hosts a dinner of chili or stew for the start-ups. At this first one, Graham and [cofounder Jessica] Livingston distribute gray T shirts emblazoned with one of Graham’s pithiest admonitions, MAKE SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT. A second, black shirt is bestowed only to start-ups that achieve a “liquidity event”—a purchase by a larger company or an IPO. It reads, I MADE SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT.

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  • Big Tech’s New Adversaries in Europe

    Big Tech’s New Adversaries in Europe

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    If the past five years of EU tech rules could take human form, they would embody Thierry Breton. The bombastic commissioner, with his swoop of white hair, became the public face of Brussels’ irritation with American tech giants, touring Silicon Valley last summer to personally remind the industry of looming regulatory deadlines.

    Combative and outspoken, Breton warned that Apple had spent too long “squeezing” other companies out of the market. In a case against TikTok, he emphasized, “our children are not guinea pigs for social media.”

    His confrontational attitude to the CEOs themselves was visible in his posts on X. In the lead-up to Musk’s interview with Donald Trump, Breton posted a vague but threatening letter on his account reminding Musk there would be consequences if he used his platform to amplify “harmful content.” Last year, he published a photo with Mark Zuckerberg, declaring a new EU motto of “move fast to fix things”—a jibe at the notorious early Facebook slogan. And in a 2023 meeting with Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Breton reportedly got him to agree to an “AI pact” on the spot, before tweeting the agreement, making it difficult for Pichai to back out.

    Yet in this week’s reshuffle of top EU jobs, Breton resigned—a decision he alleged was due to backroom dealing between EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and French president Emmanuel Macron.

    “I’m sure [the tech giants are] happy Mr. Breton will go, because he understood you have to hit shareholders’ pockets when it comes to fines,” says Umberto Gambini, a former adviser at the EU Parliament and now a partner at consultancy Forward Global.

    Breton is to be effectively replaced by the Finnish politician Henna Virkkunen, from the center-right EPP Group, who has previously worked on the Digital Services Act.

    “Her style will surely be less brutal and maybe less visible on X than Breton,” says Gambini. “It could be an opportunity to restart and reboot the relations.”

    Little is known about Virkkunen’s attitude to Big Tech’s role in Europe’s economy. But her role has been reshaped to fit von der Leyen’s priorities for her next five-year term. While Breton was the commissioner for the internal market, Virkkunen will work with the same team but operate under the upgraded title of executive vice president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, meaning she reports directly to von der Leyen.

    The 27 commissioners, who form von der Leyen’s new team and are each tasked with a different area of focus, still have to be approved by the European Parliament—a process that could take weeks.

    “[Previously], it was very, very clear that the commission was ambitious when it came to thinking about and proposing new legislation to counter all these different threats that they had perceived, especially those posed by big technology platforms,” says Mathias Vermeulen, public policy director at Brussels-based consultancy AWO. “That is not a political priority anymore, in the sense that legislation has been adopted and now has to be enforced.”

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  • Trump’s New Silicon Valley Supporters Really Want You to Forget He Called Nazis ‘Fine People’

    Trump’s New Silicon Valley Supporters Really Want You to Forget He Called Nazis ‘Fine People’

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    Some of Donald Trump’s biggest and newest supporters from finance and Silicon Valley, including Elon Musk and Bill Ackman, have spent the past several weeks trying to whitewash comments the former president and current Republican presidential nominee made in relation to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

    In the past week, the Kamala Harris presidential campaign and President Joe Biden both highlighted Trump’s August 15, 2017 comment, when the former president said there were “very fine people on both sides” of the clashes that followed the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville.

    For years, Trump supporters have defended his comments, claiming he was speaking about a nonexistent group of nonracist rallygoers who were there just to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

    While Trump did condemn the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who took part in the rally, those who covered the event have repeatedly pointed out that only extremists were involved in the march, including members of the so-called alt-right, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and far-right militias. Trump’s “fine people” comments were at best misleading and at worst tacit support for extremists, despite his subsequent disavowal. Trump has consistently been slammed by critics for his comments, but false claims from Trump supporters have persisted. They resurfaced earlier this year when a Snopes fact check titled “No, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ‘Very Fine People.’” Snopes later added an editor’s note, clarifying that those covering the rally said it was “conceived of, led by, and attended by white supremacists, and that therefore Trump’s characterization was wrong.”

    But over the past few weeks, Trump’s supporters in Silicon Valley and Wall Street—some of whom began officially supporting the former president following his assassination attempt last month—have also tried to rewrite history.

    David Marcus, the crypto entrepreneur and CEO of Lightspark who has been a Democratic Party supporter for years, posted last month that he was now backing Trump’s campaign.

    In an X post last week that has been viewed 33 million times, Marcus claimed that Trump’s “very fine people” comment had been purposely taken out of context by the media. “Realizing that this was and continues to be a lie was a turning point for me,” Marcus wrote on X, quoting a post from the official Harris campaign account that marked the seven-year anniversary since Trump made the comments.

    In response to Marcus’ post, Shaun Maguire, a partner at venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, wrote: “Totally agree.” Hours after the assassination attempt last month, Maguire said he was donating $300,000 to the Trump campaign.

    This wasn’t the first time Maguire challenged what happened in Charlottesville: In June, Maguire cited a post from disinformation account End Wokeness and wrote on X: “Remember Charlottesville when Trump called neo-Nazis very fine people? I only saw the full clip for the first time today. It’s a must watch—he literally CONDEMNS the Neo Nazis and white nationalists.”

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  • Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Dies at 56

    Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Dies at 56

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    The unassuming house on Santa Margarita Avenue in Menlo Park, California, had been empty for only a couple of years when I visited in 2008, but the ghosts were still there. This was where Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google a decade previous. Here was the garage once packed with newly delivered servers and routers; there were the carpeted rooms at the back of the house where Page, Brin, and their first employee Craig Silverstein churned out code; out the window was the backyard with the hot tub.

    In Google’s infancy the house belonged to a young couple, Dennis Troper and Susan Wojcicki, who had recently purchased it for $615,000. To help with the mortgage, the Google duo paid them $1,700 a month to rent unused space. “They entered through the garage,” Wojcicki later told me. “They weren’t allowed to enter the front door.”

    Wojcicki found herself hanging out with the young founders and became fascinated by the rise of the search startup. She soon joined it herself, about the time the 15-person company moved out of her house and into an actual office, over a bicycle shop in Palo Alto. In 2002, she took over the Google advertising arm, eventually heading a multibillion dollar business that transformed the entire industry. In 2014, she became CEO of the company’s video product YouTube, running one of the world’s biggest media properties and navigating it through competitions with other social networks and crises of content moderation. Though she was one of the most powerful women in all of business, she played it low-key, even to her departure in February 2023, “to start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I’m passionate about,” as she wrote in the company blog.

    That same low-key ethic persisted in her difficult final years, where she privately battled non-small cell lung cancer. On Friday, Troper said that Susan Wojcicki died at 56.

    In a company known for head-scratching quirks, absurd ambitions, and splashy profiles, Wojcicki somehow ducked the biggest spotlights while taking on gargantuan responsibilities. Even before Eric Schmidt became Google’s CEO and became known as the adult in the room, Wojcicki was a calm, analytical presence whose wise counsel and steady work ethic qualified her for the company’s most critical roles, even as Google, later named Alphabet, grew to one of the world’s most powerful companies. In the earliest days, her educational pedigree–including a degree at Harvard and an MBA from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA—as well as her Intel experience, made her a relative veteran compared to the peach-fuzzers in charge. She was also literally a member of the family, after cofounder Brin married her sister Ann (they divorced in 2015).

    Well before Schmidt’s arrival, Wojcicki was active in steering Google towards profitability. “There was a transition where we realized that we could make a lot more money from the advertising, as opposed to syndicating search on the web,” she told me in 2008, in an interview for my history of the company.

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  • What Project 2025 Means for Big Tech … and Everyone Else

    What Project 2025 Means for Big Tech … and Everyone Else

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    The Republican Party’s official platform for the 2024 elections is even more explicit, promising to roll back the Biden administration’s early efforts to ensure AI safety and “defend the right to mine Bitcoin.”

    All of these changes would conveniently benefit some of Trump’s most vocal and important backers in Silicon Valley. Trump’s running mate, Republican senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, has long had connections to the tech industry, particularly through his former employer, billionaire founder of Palantir and longtime Trump backer Peter Thiel. (Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founder’s Fund, invested $200 million in crypto earlier this year.)

    Thiel is one of several other Silicon Valley heavyweights who have recently thrown their support behind Trump. In the past month, Elon Musk and David Sacks have both been vocal about backing the former president. Venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, whose firm a16z has invested in several crypto and AI startups, have also said they will be donating to the Trump campaign.

    “They see this as their chance to prevent future regulation,” says Haworth. “They are buying the ability to avoid oversight.”

    Reporting from Bloomberg found that sections of Project 2025 were written by people who have worked or lobbied for companies like Meta, Amazon, and undisclosed bitcoin companies. Both Trump and independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have courted donors in the crypto space, and in May, the Trump campaign announced it would accept donations in cryptocurrency.

    But Project 2025 wouldn’t necessarily favor all tech companies. In the document, the authors accuse Big Tech companies of attempting “to drive diverse political viewpoints from the digital town square.” The plan supports legislation that would eliminate the immunities granted to social media platforms by Section 230, which protects companies from being legally held responsible for user-generated content on their sites, and pushes for “anti-discrimination” policies that “prohibit discrimination against core political viewpoints.”

    It would also seek to impose transparency rules on social platforms, saying that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) “could require these platforms to provide greater specificity regarding their terms of service, and it could hold them accountable by prohibiting actions that are inconsistent with those plain and particular terms.”

    And despite Trump’s own promise to bring back TikTok, Project 2025 suggests the administration “ban all Chinese social media apps such as TikTok and WeChat, which pose significant national security risks and expose American consumers to data and identity theft.”

    West says the plan is full of contradictions when it comes to its approach to regulation. It’s also, he says, notably soft on industries where tech billionaires and venture capitalists have put a significant amount of money, namely AI and cryptocurrency. “Project 2025 is not just to be a policy statement, but to be a fundraising vehicle,” he says. “So, I think the money angle is important in terms of helping to resolve some of the seemingly inconsistencies in the regulatory approach.”

    It remains to be seen how impactful Project 2025 could be on a future Republican administration. On Tuesday, Paul Dans, the director of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, stepped down. Though Trump himself has sought to distance himself from the plan, reporting from the Wall Street Journal indicates that while the project may be lower profile, it’s not going away. Instead, the Heritage Foundation is shifting its focus to making a list of conservative personnel who could be hired into a Republican administration to execute the party’s vision.

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  • OpenAI-Backed Nonprofits Have Gone Back on Their Transparency Pledges

    OpenAI-Backed Nonprofits Have Gone Back on Their Transparency Pledges

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    Neither database mandates nor generally contains up-to-date versions of the records that UBI Charitable and OpenResearch had said they provided in the past.

    The original YC Research conflict-of-interest policy that Das did share calls for company insiders to be upfront about transactions in which their impartiality could be questioned and for the board to decide how to proceed.

    Das says the policy “may have been amended since OpenResearch’s policies changed (including when the name was changed from YC Research), but the core elements remain the same.”

    No Website

    UBI Charitable launched in 2020 with $10 million donated from OpenAI, as first reported by TechCrunch last year. UBI Charitable’s aim, according to its government filings, is putting the over $31 million it received by the end of 2022 to support initiatives that try to offset “the societal impacts” of new technologies and ensure no one is left behind. It has donated largely to CitySquare in Dallas and Heartland Alliance in Chicago, both of which work on a range of projects to fight poverty.

    UBI Charitable doesn’t appear to have a website but shares a San Francisco address with OpenResearch and OpenAI, and OpenAI staff have been listed on UBI Charitable’s government paperwork. Its three Form 990 filings since launching all state that records including governing documents, financial statements, and a conflict-of-interest policy were available upon request.

    Rick Cohen, chief operating and communications officer for National Council of Nonprofits, an advocacy group, says “available upon request” is a standard answer plugged in by accounting firms. OpenAI, OpenResearch, and UBI Charitable have always shared the same San Francisco accounting firm, Fontanello Duffield & Otake, which didn’t respond to a request for comment.

    Miscommunication or poor oversight could lead to the standard answer about access to records getting submitted, “even if the organization wasn’t intending to make them available,” Cohen says.

    The disclosure question ended up on what’s known as the Form 990 as part of an effort in 2008 to help the increasingly complex world of nonprofits showcase their adherence to governance best practices, at least as implied by the IRS, says Kevin Doyle, senior director of finance and accountability at Charity Navigator, which evaluates nonprofits to help guide donors’ giving decisions. “Having that sort of transparency story is a way to indicate to donors that their money is going to be used responsibly,” Doyle says.

    OpenResearch solicits donations on its website, and UBI Charitable stated on its most recent IRS filing that it had received over $27 million in public support. Doyle says Charity Navigator’s data show donations tend to flow to organizations it rates higher, with transparency among the measured factors.

    It’s certainly not unheard of for organizations to share a wide range of records. Charity Navigator has found that most of the roughly 900 largest US nonprofits reliant on individual donors publish financial statements on their websites. It doesn’t track disclosure of bylaws or conflict-of-interest policies.

    Charity Navigator publishes its own audited financial statements and at least eight nonstandard policies it maintains, including ones on how long it retains documents, how it treats whistleblower complaints, and which gifts staff can accept. “Donors can look into what we’re doing and make their own judgment rather than us operating as a black box, saying, ‘Please give us money, but don’t ask any questions,’” Doyle says.

    Cohen of the National Council of Nonprofits cautions that over-disclosure could create vulnerabilities. Posting a disaster-recovery plan, for example, could offer a roadmap to computer hackers. He adds that just because organizations have a policy on paper doesn’t mean they follow it. But knowing what they were supposed to do to evaluate a potential conflict of interest could still allow for more public accountability than otherwise possible, and if AI could be as consequential as Altman envisions, the scrutiny may very well be needed.

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  • AI Is Coming for Big Tech Jobs—but Not in the Way You Think

    AI Is Coming for Big Tech Jobs—but Not in the Way You Think

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    Aaron Damigos’ inbox was hit with a dreaded, ubiquitous business-update calendar invite on June 3. The meeting included someone from HR, his manager, and upper management—and ultimately resulted in the sudden end to his job as a web support associate with Microsoft.

    Microsoft reportedly laid off some 1,000 people in early June, pulling from its mixed reality and Azure cloud departments, and also Damigos’ consumer sales division. An email to employees from Jason Zander, executive vice president of strategic missions and technologies at Microsoft, leaked to Business Insider, blamed a pivot to invest in artificial intelligence: “Our clear focus as a company is to define the AI wave and empower all our customers to succeed in the adoption of this transformative technology. Along the way, we make decisions that align with our long-term vision and strategy while ensuring the sustainability and growth of Microsoft.”

    Damigos, who lives in Tacoma, Washington, says he wasn’t told that a push for AI directly led to the end of his job specifically, which involved helping customers understand how to use Microsoft products. But it’s clear that Microsoft, the largest backer of OpenAI, is all in on the tech. “I think the shift toward AI work has unfortunately led to the deprioritization of some essential customer-facing roles,” says Damigos, who has been chronicling his layoff journey and showcasing his skills on TikTok. “I helped people understand how to effectively use and understand the products.” He adds that he felt his team had “a lot of potential” to make a better customer experience for Microsoft—but ultimately, the company moved to make investments elsewhere.

    Microsoft did not confirm the authenticity of Zander’s emails. “Organizational and workforce adjustments are a necessary and regular part of managing our business,” says Craig Cincotta, a Microsoft spokesperson. “We will continue to prioritize and invest in strategic growth areas for our future and in support of our customers and partners.”

    No one knows yet quite how AI will impact work in the long term, but many experts largely agree that AI will not replace most workers anytime soon. “AI will reshape the labor market,” says Nick Bunker, director of economic research at the job board Indeed. “It’s just not clear how it will reshape it.” Some predict that it will create more jobs—but some workers are currently training their own AI replacements. But the layoffs happening now show that AI hype, not futuristic AI colleagues, can cause thousands of people to lose their jobs.

    Microsoft isn’t alone. Dropbox announced 500 layoffs in April 2023, and CEO Drew Houston acknowledged that AI had played a role. “In an ideal world, we’d simply shift people from one team to another. And we’ve done that wherever possible,” Houston’s statement said. “However, our next stage of growth requires a different mix of skill sets, particularly in AI and early-stage product development.” Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg made similar statements about cutting jobs to invest in AI earlier this year, saying in a post in February: “A major goal will be building the most popular and most advanced AI products and services,” as Meta left its “year of efficiency,” which resulted in downsizing the company. Google, too, has funneled money into its Anthropic AI developments, and its CEO, Sindar Pichai, warned of continuous cuts throughout 2024, which began in January. That comes despite Google reporting strong growth. “We’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” says Bailey Tomson, a Google spokesperson. In 2023 and 2024, several Google teams “made changes to become more efficient and work better,” Tomson says. “Through this, we’re simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers.”



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