Geekwire recently published an article about a young Swiss, Diego Granziol, who graduated from Oxford University in 2020 with a PhD in machine learning. Amazon offered him a job, and he decided to move to Seattle instead of other offers. However, before he could even start his job, Amazon rescinded the offer due to a downsizing process that began earlier this year. Granziol is now suing Amazon for the company’s rude behavior.
Amazon’s downsizing process is a perplexing move for a company that has a business model oriented towards expansion over profit. Marxists argue that mass, or the power a firm has in a particular market, is the real key to success. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, agreed with Marxist geographer David Harvey’s idea that mass is the most important thing.
Despite Amazon’s downsizing process, the company’s first-quarter sales still grew 9%, beating Wall Street’s expectations. The company expects to generate $127 billion to $133 billion in revenue this quarter. However, the Seattle Times sheds little light on recent developments and simply parrots back the explanations given to the press by tech executives.
Job cuts and share buybacks go hand in hand, as evidenced by Amazon’s recently announced $10 billion share buyback program and recent share buyback spending. This is a similar trend at Microsoft and Meta, with both companies cutting tech jobs while buying back shares.
Overall, Seattle’s tech companies are surrendering large amounts of assets that grow in value to speculators and renters to extract value. This corporate raid has been going on since the Reagan era, and it’s unlikely to end soon.