Elon Musk happened.  Nearly all the big tech companies laid off workers in large numbers within the past few months of 2022 and 2023.

This seems to be a big secret.  None of the media reports what just happened.  I want historians to know first- hand.

Two things happened.

• The first was that Elon Musk bought the online site twitter.com and proceeded to fire 2/3rds of the employees.  Roughly 5,000 employees out of 7,500. What everyone in management around the world realized was that the company ran just as well or better with the remaining ⅓ of the employees (2,500.)  Fellow tech companies were forced to question whether the same excess of employees was also a problem of theirs. They proceeded to fire many employees.
• The second was that many tech companies withdrew operations from Russia on orders from the U.S. government.  As I said in an earlier blog, every company in the world that uses American tech immediately had reason to doubt the reliability of American tech companies in providing continuing maintenance support.  Since competitors have not fully entered the market, the full impact is still a long way off but the initial impact was evident in year- end 2022 tech sales data. Firing followed.

Any action by Elon Musk is significant.  Mr. Musk is a technical and a managerial genius of historic proportions.  He created the first successful electric car in this century, the Tesla, which has the largest global market as of this date and is very profitable.  He created the first successful commercial space rocket company in history. Musk’s SpaceX launched more successful rockets last year than NASA launched in its whole history.