Tech CEOs: Who’s the Meanest of Them All

Fuck you!

That’s the message being sent by tech industry leaders over the past three years. A pattern of rhetoric that has grown louder and more entrenched.

Fuck you, get back to the office.

Fuck you, we’re laying you off.

Fuck you, we’re reducing your employee benefits.

Fuck you, we’re replacing you with AI.

This was a tough decision, but not really. Thank you for your years of service, but seriously, fuck you.

I surely can’t be the only one that’s noticed this trend since Elon Musk rode into Twitter like a bull in a china shop and was widely commended for removing anyone who didn’t have the sword of a H-1B visa hanging over their heads. He tried to transplant the kafala system into the land of the free and somehow it caught on, and now theatrical malice and spiteful posturing is the name of the game in the tech industry.

Many of today’s tech CEOs are not your ones of lore; once known for their idealistic “Don’t be evil” grandstanding, they have now aligned themselves with the darkest elements of society; pandering to a President who threatens to dismantle habeas corpus (because constitutional legal protections are just another legacy system ripe for disruption) and tearing down all programs involving diversity, equity and inclusion. The industry that once promised to democratise information and empower the marginalised has instead become the eager assistant to authoritarianism, exchanging the pretense of values for the certainty of tax cuts and deregulation.

The heads of the world’s largest tech firms pictured during the inauguration of The Felon earlier this year will go down in history as a poignant image. The moment when these leaders, whose algorithms subtly yet profoundly manipulate billions of human decisions every day, aligned themselves with a cultish political movement built on division, hatred, cruelty, discrimination and authoritarianism.

Well now the hoodies are off, revealing what was always lurking beneath the carefully cultivated casual veneer: the same old ruthless accumulation of power and capital. Transforming from ‘making the world a better place’ to ‘making the world know its place’.

We’re witnessing a mask-off moment, revealing that the industry’s supposed values were always conditional, having calculated that there’s more profit in catering to facism than in resisting it.

A lot of tech CEOs today appear to be operating from the same playbook: “Maximizing Shareholder Value Through Strategic Workforce Terrorisation.”

It began with Musk and Twitter in 2022, when he fired half the company and demanded “extremely hardcore” work from the remaining survivors. The cultural aftershock of that behavior shouldn’t be understated. It led to downstream effects across the industry where a new bar was set for performative cruelty, both as a management style and a marketing campaign.

It redefined what was acceptable in the name of “innovation”. Like a bunch of obedient little lambs, tech leaders began falling over themselves to mimic this theater of workplace suffering, each trying to outdo the other in their displays of employee disposability while their profit margins swelled. Silicon Valley’s ‘innovation’ had found a new frontier: the methodical dismantling of workplace dignity.

Since 2022, Big Tech firms have been steadily eroding any semblance of respect employees once took for granted, as if dignity were an obstacle to be swept aside. It’s almost like a calculated experiment in determining exactly how much humanity can be stripped from the employment relationship before the system breaks entirely. In the rest of this article I’ll be exploring the various ways that Big Tech have said “Fuck you” to their staff, how we can make sense of it all, and what actions we can take as a result.

Return To Office: The Big Betrayal

2020 was a scary time, but it was also a hopeful time. For a brief period we thought we were on the verge of a revolutionary workplace transformation. One defined by spatial autonomy and personal agency, where individuals could achieve a more harmonious balance between their personal and professional lives.

Tech leadership was fully on board with the idea of location independence, which gave rise to a new hope that a new kind of society would emerge. One where 10% of GDP is not built around serving cold sandwiches to commuters on packed trains. A more diversified economy that creates new pockets of prosperity outside of big urban centers, and much less of this bullshit 👇

“We’re going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work for our scale”, Zuckerberg said in 2020.

Facebook went onto say in 2021 that“We believe how we work is more important than where we work”

This didn’t last long at all as Meta commanded staff to attend the office at least 3 days a week as of 2023.

“There has to be a dialogue of respect on both sides” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in 2021. “I think CEOs need to embrace the fact that, in the modern workplace, employees want to have a say in where they work.”

As of 2025, Google is now threatening their staff if they don’t move to within 50 miles of an office.

In another example of “office creep” and smashing of employee morale, Uber began tightening the office attendance screws while performing an elegant bait-and-switch on their sabbatical policy. Staff were obviously furious as some were approaching 5 years of tenure and had already booked their trips, only to be rug pulled by the company who said the new policy now mandated 8 years of service. ‘That reward you’ve been working toward for half a decade? We’ve decided you need to invest 60% more time before you’ve truly earned it. It is what it is. Fuck you!’

“Work won’t be somewhere you go, it’ll just be something you do”, Salesforce said in 2021. “An immersive workspace is no longer limited to a desk in our Towers; the 9-to-5 workday is dead”

Bold words from a company that recently issued an aggressive RTO mandate that upended the lives of many of their staff, tracking badge scans and boasting of an “internal dashboard” to track attendance.

As I laid out in this article last year, RTO was never about “culture” or “collaboration”, but a calculated post-pandemic power recalibration as executives frantically reasserted control after workers briefly experienced a glimpse of autonomy during Covid.

As corporate executives demanded more physical presence with the desperation of abandoned lovers, they revealed an uncomfortable truth: without subordinates to impress and visual reinforcement of status hierarchies as they go peacocking throughout the office, their leadership identity collapsed. Many found themselves reduced to wandering through empty offices, deprived of the daily theatre of subordination. The RTO crusade wasn’t about productivity but just existential panic dressed as business strategy. A desperate attempt to restore the natural order where executive importance was visibly, physically affirmed.

By framing remote work as the source of business underperformance, executives neatly deflected attention from their own strategic missteps and pandemic-era hiring binges. In what looked like a collective coordinated tantrum from a group of obscenely wealthy emotionally charged men, it was decided that employees once again organise their lives around leadership’s ego needs while simultaneously serving as convenient scapegoats for questionable C-suite decisions. ‘The company’s underperforming because you’re working in pyjamas’ makes for a more comfortable narrative than ‘we misread the market and overextended during a bubble’.

Layoffs: Transforming Fear into a Management Tool

Tech layoffs have evolved from somber corporate funerals complete with CEO eulogies expressing deep remorse, into efficient quarterly human sacrifice rituals. What began with tearful videos has transformed into clinical ‘workforce adjustments’ designed not just to cut costs, but to keep survivors in a perpetual state of grateful terror.

The evolution of the tech layoff script tells us everything: Act I featured CEOs performing elaborate displays of anguish and at least maintained the pretense of emotional turmoil:

‘This is the hardest decision I’ve ever made’

‘This breaks my heart and i’m truly sorry that we have to do this’

‘This hurts me more than it hurts you’

I mean who could forget this 👇

By Act V the crocodile tears had dried up and executives no longer bother with the performative empathy displayed in previous acts.

Layoffs evolved from a “painful last resort to save the company” to “standard quarterly optimisation to rightsize our business’.

The corporate bait-and-switch reached Machiavellian perfection when companies axed the very employees who had just surrendered to RTO mandates. After forcing remote workers to perform the modern equivalent of a pilgrimage (selling homes, disrupting children’s education, abandoning support networks) companies rewarded this extraordinary compliance with a stab in the back. With breathtaking timing companies announced “Fuck you, it’s layoff time”, delivered to the very same employees who had just rearranged their entire existence to comply with executive whims. Thank you for dismantling your life for a job that never intended to keep you.

Meta announced layoffs in November 2022 of more than 11,000 staff (13% of the workforce), again in March 2023 and another 3,600 in March 2025. Google did something similar, with 12,000 people laid off in January 2023, another 1000 in January 2024 with another 200 in May 2024. A similar pattern has occurred with Amazon and other big tech companies (cycles of layoffs, not just one big deep cut).

This pattern of “repeated layoffs” feels deliberate because of its perceived effectiveness. Keeping employees in a perpetual state of job insecurity isn’t just cruel, it’s a potent tool for management to extract maximum effort with minimal loyalty. When workers live in fear of losing their livelihoods at any moment, they are less likely to push back, demand fair treatment, or even consider standing up for their rights. It’s a brutal form of psychological manipulation that transforms the workplace into a constant pressure cooker.

The quarterly and annual layoff announcements we’ve become accustomed to now function just as public executions did in medieval times; a spectacle designed not just to remove the unfortunate victims but to terrify the survivors into compliance.

There’s a brutally elegant psychological calculus to all of this, where employees who fear for their livelihoods become docile, compliant, and pathologically productive. Like Pavlov’s dogs trained to salivate at the bell, we’ve now been conditioned to respond to layoff rumors with increased output and decreased demands. This manufactured precarity serves as the perfect control mechanism by these companies. A workforce perpetually balanced on the high wire of potential unemployment will accept deteriorating conditions while expressing gratitude for the privilege.

Tech companies realised, in a form of strategic psychopathy, that employees perpetually shadowed by job insecurity will push themselves to physical and mental limits, accept stagnant compensation, and internalise the message that they should be grateful merely to survive each round of cuts. Staff tell themselves that extraordinary effort is merely the baseline for survival. In this new world, workforce anxiety functions as a strategic management tool.

This manufactured climate of fear delivers what no performance management system could: a self-regulating workforce that interprets the most intrusive demands (like mandatory 5-day office attendance to conduct Zoom meetings) as opportunities to demonstrate their indispensability rather than recognising them as calculated erosions of their hard-won autonomy.

AI: Your job is just a prompt away

Nice career you have there. Shame if something were to happen to it

The tone from tech leadership is clear:

You’re nothing more than an expendable cog. Once AI reaches a certain level of competence, you’re out with the trash.

Like a digital guillotine suspended over employees’ careers, AI has transformed from an exciting frontier into a tool of fear. Whilst they wax lyrical about the importance of “being together in the office” and “team collaboration”, tech executives are privately salivating over spreadsheets showing how many salary packages can be eliminated with each new model release.

The CEO of Duolingo proudly came out recently to say AI is replacing a lot of their contract workers. He said “headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work.”

Not to be outdone in parroting corporate boilerplate, this was almost exactly what was said by Shopify’s CEO when he said teams must show why they “cannot get what they want done using AI”.

Zucker-borg has jumped on this train by announcing that AI will replace a lot of their mid-level engineers in writing code.

Eric Schmidt couldn’t have been more blunt when he said “We believe, as an industry, that in one year, the vast majority of programmers will be replaced by AI”. It should shock no one that this is also the guy who blamed Google falling behind on AI on remote work policies. In executive logic, staff are both replaceable and responsible for any perceived failure. Remember, plebs, your job is replaceable by technology, but somehow your physical presence in an office remains irreplaceable.

If you’re tuned into this messaging it starts to feel less like coincidence and more like a carefully orchestrated strategy; to instill fear and ensure obedience through subtle threats. A calculated effort to keep workers scared and compliant, knowing that a workforce riddled with anxiety is easier to control and manipulate. Rising worker influence that emerged through activism around racial injustice in 2020 gave executives a taste of labour empowerment, and they’ve been working industriously on ways to keep discontent at bay ever since.

I’m not anti-AI at all and I would consider myself an AI Enthusiast if anything. If what these men say is true, then that’s fantastic and we’re on the brink of something completely extraordinary. If AI can genuinely build an entire application for me with a few prompts, then suddenly I’m Master of the Universe. I can build out apps myself, with minimal effort, and wrangle software to my personal needs and desires without having to wait on a company’s latest release.

But this just isn’t the reality with Generative AI today. The disconnect between executive leadership, hypnotised by fake demos and buzzword laden presentations brimming with snake oil (in addition to their strategy of instilling fear into their workforce), is in stark contrast to the experience of many programmers who see AI as a tool rather than as a replacement. If it were a replacement, you can guarantee programmers (notorious for their obsession with automation) would have already jumped on board. I’d love nothing more then to tell my manager “Yes I’ll work on that feature today and have it shipped by tomorrow”, whilst I spend the day getting hot stone massages. That’s my own personal AGI threshold.

The CEO of Klarna learnt this the hard way when he made headlines last year by saying AI “can already do all of the jobs” (ALL OF THE JOBS!!!), a statement that preceded the company’s eager pivot to offload customer support to large language models.

Unsurprisingly, customers rejected being palmed off to soulless chatbots which forced Klarna into a mortifying retreat, and after boldly declaring humans obsolete he’s now sheepishly rehiring the very workers he claimed AI would replace. It reveals the hollow nature of this kind of technological evangelism and the fact that these AI prophecies were nothing more than empty techno-utopian fantasies disconnected from the basic realities of customer service.

This pattern reveals a disturbing truth about today’s executive class: many of them are simply intellectual parasites migrating through the corporate ecosystem, latching onto trends they barely comprehend but eagerly monetise. AI is mysterious enough to instil fear, profitable enough to justify investment, and conveniently positioned as the ultimate labour replacement threat. “We could replace you with AI” has become the new “there are a hundred CVs on my desk!”

This type of executive represents perhaps the most dangerous archetype in modern business: the technologically illiterate decision-maker wielding unquestioned authority over technological decisions, using AI not as a tool for progress but as a cudgel against worker autonomy. AI isn’t about innovation or efficiency, but about power. It’s become the perfect threat in organisations: work harder, accept less, or watch as your job is “streamlined” by an algorithm you couldn’t possibly understand.

Management tactics evolve, but looking back through history they show a similar pattern. From ‘work faster or we’ll replace you with machines’ during the Industrial Revolution, to ‘accept lower wages or we’ll offshore your job’ in the globalisation era, to today’s ‘comply or we’ll prompt ChatGPT to do your job’. But the fundamental strategy remains unchanged: create precarity, foster division, and above all, ensure workers feel replaceable.

Inside the CEO Psyche

To conclude, we should briefly explore why this is happening and what’s going on inside the minds of some of these psychopaths.

First, there’s the post-pandemic power correction I mentioned earlier. During Covid, tech workers briefly experienced unprecedented autonomy and leverage. For executives accustomed to controlling every aspect of their corporate fiefdoms, this represented an existential crisis. The subsequent backlash (harsh RTO mandates, layoff cycles, benefit reductions) reflects a desperate attempt to reassert dominance, like an insecure parent overcompensating after temporarily losing authority.

There’s also the echo chamber effect. These executives largely move in the same rarefied circles, sit on each other’s boards, and attend the same exclusive conferences. When one adopts a harsh stance toward labour with apparent success (as Musk did), others follow suit. Remember, Musk didn’t just fire people; he made a spectacle of it (something he appears to revel in).

No one wants to be seen as the “soft” CEO who prioritises worker wellbeing over shareholder returns. The result is a competitive race to the bottom in employee treatment, with each executive trying to outdo the others in displays of “tough leadership” in a twisted kind of virtue signaling to their investors.

Beneath this posturing lies profound insecurity. Despite their wealth and power, many tech CEOs harbor deep-seated fears of irrelevance. They know technology now moves faster than even they can comprehend. If they don’t squeeze harder (cutting labour costs, demanding more output, maintaining visual control) they fear being eaten alive by hungrier startups or rendered obsolete by the very AI they’re using to threaten their workforce.

Where do we go from here?

The tensions between labour and capital are nothing new, and it’s an ongoing inherent feature of the capitalist system we live under. For now we’re stuck with it; the worst economic system except all the others.

But let’s be clear: we’re witnessing a coordinated assault on worker dignity disguised as business necessity and we shouldn’t be blind to what’s happening. The tech industry that once promised to “make the world a better place” has revealed its true priorities, and they don’t include your wellbeing.

So, what can we do?

First, recognise the gaslighting. When executives claim RTO is about “collaboration” while scheduling back-to-back Zoom meetings in half-empty offices, call it what it is: a control mechanism.

When they threaten to replace you with AI that can barely generate coherent code, understand it for what it is: a fear tactic.

Awareness is the first step toward resistance and maintaining your sanity in the corporate madhouse of distorted mirrors. Especially in a world of AI slop and social media driven misinformation, understanding that your mind is the battlefield they’re trying to conquer is crucial. Train yourself to recognise the doublespeak, the corporate propaganda, the contradictory messages, the bullshit.

Second, document everything. Keep records of shifting policies, broken promises, and conflicting mandates. The tech industry has normalised memory-holing its own statements, but receipts don’t lie. When Meta claimed remote work was the future before demanding everyone return to offices, that wasn’t a strategy pivot; it was a betrayal of trust. Similarly when Uber offered a paid sabbatical to their staff after 5 years of service, before changing the rules mid game.

Third, build solidarity networks. The atomisation of tech workers is by design (isolated individuals are easier to control than connected communities). Whether through formal unions (which have made surprising inroads at companies like Google and Microsoft) or informal support groups, find your people. Go to Meetups, attend conferences, share war stories and salary information and compare notes on management tactics. The more we share this information, the more we can collectively spot the patterns and the playbooks.

Forth, demand transparency. If AI truly can replace your job, ask for demonstrations, not vague threats. If RTO is essential for collaboration, request data showing improved outcomes. Force executives to defend their decisions with evidence, not empty platitudes about “company culture.” Remind them every time they drone on about being “data driven”.

Finally, consider that the current model might be unsustainable. The tech industry’s race to the bottom in worker treatment coincides with declining innovation and growing public distrust. Many of us may have to question whether we want to continue to associate with an industry that demands cultish devotion while offering increasingly transactional relationships. The irony isn’t lost on me as I fled the finance sector’s burnout culture a decade ago, seeking refuge in tech’s seemingly more humane environment.

For a brief, shining period from 2015 to 2022, that promise held true and tech represented salvation for me personally. I started out as a clueless junior at a very nice company with a great team that respected each other and offered a dignified workspace to build things. But watching the industry’s rapid regression since 2022 feels particularly disturbing, as tech executives plagiarise the worst management practices from the very industries they once mocked, we find ourselves in a familiar dystopia.

Today a lot of us face a choice: accept the regression to industrial-age labour practices dressed in hoodies and buzzwords, or reclaim the industry’s original promise. It’s not just about better working conditions but about whether technology will serve as a tool for human flourishing or human control. The industry attracted some of the most creative problem-solvers on the planet, people who don’t accept “that’s just how things are” and increasingly won’t accept it in their workplaces either.

The future of work isn’t being written in executive boardrooms alone; it’s being written in Slack channels, Discord servers, sub-Reddits and yes, union meetings across the industry. Will it be visionary companies that voluntarily create more sustainable work environments, or will it require collective action from the workforce? Whatever happens, the current model of maximising shareholder value through employee intimidation has an expiration date.

No empire lasts forever, especially not ones powered by resentment instead of respect. The tech industry will either rediscover its soul, or watch as its most talented builders create something better elsewhere.