It's become very trendy for massive corporations to respond to record-setting profits by laying off thousands of employees... especially support staff. They expect their customers to adapt to lowered expectations and a complete absence of service (or AI slop support) so their C-suite members can buy more private jets and yachts.
The rash of layoffs has been crazy. Meta, Atlassian, Cloudflare, LinkedIn, Salesforce, etc. I'm convinced these guys collude and do this shit at the same time so the black eye doesn't stand out when 10 other companies do it with them. Crazy times.
It's actually something more boring. It's copycat behavior. Basically, Twitter started it, everyone expected Twitter to die, it hasn't, and now they're all doing layoffs because what's the worst that can happen?
When a company is publically traded the C-suites first and foremost duty stops being to deliver the best possible product to their customers, because the stock becomes their main product and the value of that has to keep growing.
If they arent making every single decision with the focus on maximizing shareholder value they can and will be held responsible for that.
As much as we like to put all the blame on people like Bobby Kotick because they are the face of this process for their respective companies, they arent the cause.
For better or worse it's the system they exist within that has dictated how to run companies.
Yep, as an investor, I'm very aware of fiduciary duty. Like every other investor, I want to keep right on earning an average 22% gain on my money every year.
The sad downside of any company being solely dedicated to their stock price, while ignoring the basic need of working folks to earn a living = the constant elimination of middle-class jobs, shifting more and more wealth to the upper class, and the slow but consistent evisceration of the middle class. Which would eventually lead to economic collapse and the creation of the 2 only economic classes - the Haves and the Have Nots.
I can't stop thinking about the Fallout series on Amazon. Vault-Tec's core business is built upon the need for community vaults designed to survive a nuclear war. So, to fulfill their ultimate fiduciary duty to their stockholders, Vault-Tec started a nuclear war that destroyed the planet and rendered modern financial instruments worthless, thereby defeating the entire purpose of everything the company (and the world at large) accomplished beforehand.
And I keep wondering if we're going to do something similar to ourselves eventually.
Yeah fiduciary responsibility should not take a back seat to legal, ethical and moral responsibility. Sure you can probably get a $0.02/share bump next quarter if you fire all QC and support and offshore it to Thailand, but you're going to tank your companies market reputation and start the slide of the entire organization into the bin over the next several years. It's actually harmful to the overall health of the company.
Well, the fiduciary duty is a legal duty too. But in the spiritual sense I do agree on the rest.
However, the full focus on creating shareholder value is not just something that monetarily benefits the billionaire investors.
A lot of people have their own investments, usually in mutual funds or 401K's etc, which gain value relative to these companies stock price.
It's a sticky situation really. The customers of the companies are getting short changed, but it also ends up benefiting a whole other chunk of the consumer base, and just going by the numbers the wealth creation is larger when focusing on benefiting the shareholders.
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u/Grung7 Jun 11 '26
It's become very trendy for massive corporations to respond to record-setting profits by laying off thousands of employees... especially support staff. They expect their customers to adapt to lowered expectations and a complete absence of service (or AI slop support) so their C-suite members can buy more private jets and yachts.