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Cisco Lays Off 5,500 Workers to Invest More in AI, Despite Making $10.3 Billion in Profit (futurism.com)

submitted 4 months ago by Espiritdescali to c/futurology

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[–] jballs@sh.itjust.works 29 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Stock prices going up when announcing lay-offs has always baffled me. From a pure executive mathematics perspective: profit = revenue - expenses. Employees are expenses, therefore reducing expenses equals more profit.

But from a real-world perspective, employees are the knowledge and effort keeping your company alive. You don't have revenue without employees. So cutting employees is dismantling your business and ruining your ability to function long-term.

I guess that's why CEOs make the big bucks and I don't. They're able to focus on what's happening this quarter, where lowly little ol' me can only think about the big picture.

[–] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Yeah. The price boost is from the same day traders looking forward to shorting the stock later.

It baffles me that boards of directors (who ought to have high exposure to the long term stock price) allow this behavior.

I suspect it's because they intend to manipulate the stock price later with a buy-out and because they want to indebt the company to their preferred malicious lender (which they have even more stock in).