It should be good. It's the third time he's written this exact same announcement, including "taking the blame" and "making the difficult choice to cut a large group instead of smaller cuts over time" and "thanking the expendables that got the company where it is."

> I appreciate the one clean cut vs prolonged bleeding.

That's a false dichotomy, you could reduce headcount via attrition which is better in some ways.

There's also no reasoning on product impact. Is the strategy to cut products that aren't making money? Is the strategy to cut 40% across everyone because everyone can go faster?

> Owning the decision

Does it? It came across to me as an inevitability of AI, not "we over-hired". Layoffs are always a mis-management issue, because the opposite (hiring) is a management issue. If management failed to see where the market was going and now needs a different workforce, that's still a management issue.

> respecting the people that got you there

There's words, and there's money, and on these it's pretty good. But there's also an empathy with the experience they're about to go through and I'm not sure there's much of that here beyond the words. To do this well you'd need to think through what folks are about to go through and look for ways you can positively impact that beyond actions today. I've seen some companies do this better, helping teams get re-hired elsewhere, splitting off businesses to sell to other companies, incubating startups, there are lots of options. Hard, especially at this scale, but possible.

> But realistically, you can't pen a better (or, well, less bad) layoff announcement.

And this is the crux of my point, I really think you can. This was a good one, one of the better I've seen, but it's still within the realm of SV companies laying people off. In some companies, countries, industries, this would look very different, and better.

Apart from the bit where he lays 4000 people off, but himself is untouched.

Oh and the bit where he claims AI efficiencies are the reason.

If I had to do this to a company I’d built I’d fire myself too. It’s an admission of a massive failure of leadership.

And also not doing it on a Friday.

I am not sure the exists a good way to say "the business is doing great, but we still fire you".

"owning" the decision doesn't mean anything. It's just words.

Its getting a bit repetitive to see this type of comment on every tech layoff letter

I wonder if the lack of capital letters is a clever trick to make this whole annoucement look more humane and natural. Surely it's intentional: only "U.S" deserves capitals, not even his own name in the signature.

Owning it doesn’t make it less of a shit move.

Canning people when you do well is just a way to milk the cow that others raised for you. Plus it shows a blatant lack of imagination and foresight.

I just hope the remaining employees realize they’re in an ejectable seat and stop working for people like that. It’s only a matter of time the founders sell to Bending Spoons for a final paycheck and everyone else is out.

Spot on. This tweet will go down in history — right next to Jack's first tweet. We all understand businesses require difficult decisions. This is one of the best layoff letters I've seen. Short, honest, and human.

@grok remove the corporate jargon and explain it in a direct and candid way in a single sentence

@grok We're slashing the company from 10k to under 6k people because AI plus tiny teams now let us do the same work with way fewer bodies, and the CEO would rather gut half the staff in one brutal move than bleed out slowly over years.

I am curious why this got so popular, it really is the same thing, am I missing something? Is it because of elon/jack dynamics?