This year has seen big tech hemorrhage money like never before, forcing massive headline-grabbing job cuts, according to a report from CNBC.
Not a single one of the top 15 tech companies in the United States made a profit in 2022.
Even amongst the tech industry’s "big five" (Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Apple, and Microsoft), only Google’s parent company Alphabet managed to avoid any layoffs, although there are fears that job losses are on the horizon.
These enormous revenue losses and mass layoffs have forced tech executives to come forward with an apology and admit that they made a mistake.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, was an unstoppable force, dominating the social media market and consistently delivering stellar returns to investors. Then, after spending billions of dollars on the largely-failing metaverse project an forcing revenue to nosedive, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was forced to layoff around 11,000 employees and admit, "I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that."
Amazon lost more than $1 trillion in market value in 2022, becoming the world’s first public company to hit that unfathomable number, according to Bloomberg, resulting in the slashing of 10,000 jobs.
Microsoft was not far behind, reporting losses of $889 billion and layoffs of almost 8,000 employees.
Apple didn’t announce the same kind of massive layoffs as its peers, but as a result of a company-wide hiring freeze, cut around 100 recruiter jobs.
One of the highest profile layoff events of the year was at Twitter, which under the leadership of Elon Musk cut just over 3,500 jobs; not a significant number in the grand scheme of things, but quite a big deal when you take into account that it was around half of the company’s employees.
Musk has stated multiple times that Twitter is potentially on the road to bankruptcy.
Tech companies on the whole laid off around 210,000 employees, almost half of those within Q4. As an industry that has always placed innovation above all else, it is hoped that next year will bring some good news for the big guns.
