Zillow CEO Fires 500 Despite Record Profits, Citing 'Efficiency'—But the Real Reason Is Stock Buybacks
CEO Just Fired 500 People Because He Says Zillow Is More Efficient Without Them
Zillow just laid off 500 people—7% of its workforce—days before reporting its best financial results in years. The CEO claims it's about efficiency, but the numbers tell a different story: the company spent $626 million on stock buybacks in Q1 alone, nearly draining its cash reserves. This piece argues the layoffs are really about reducing share-based compensation to boost the stock price, not about making the company more efficient.
A company that voluntarily spent forty percent of its cash reserve on share repurchases in a single quarter cannot credibly describe a layoff four months later as a matter of cost necessity.
- tptacek
This piece would have been better if it had just been the prompts used to generate it. The entire underlying story is just "company does discretionary RIF".
Some of these generated stories pay their freight on HN, because they develop genuinely interesting technical[†] ideas (I'd still like to see the prompts, if I can't get the story in the author's own words). But when the story contains essentially no interesting content, it starts to make sense to consider them off-topic.
† usually! I'm equally into genuinely interesting LLM-generated explanations of thoughts on modernist poetry, I guess.
- reid
Amusing this LLM text recommends Realtor.com -- who had its own similar layoff round last week
- tofuziggy
I got too distracted by the AI generated image at the top to read the AI generated article.