There was a time not long ago when a CEO would announce mass firings to the dismay of investors. But these days, with cheaper generative AI replacing the more costly humans, it’s become a point of pride for CEOs—and a reason for shareholders to celebrate.

The latest example is Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff telling The Logan Bartlett Show podcast about cutting 4,000 customer service jobs thanks to the type of AI that Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson seemingly can’t function without. In June, Benioff said that AI is doing 50% of the work at Salesforce. Yesterday, the slimmed-down company reported a Q2 double beat on revenue ($10.24b vs. $10.14b) and EPS ($2.91 vs. $2.78), although weaker guidance for Q3 sent the stock tumbling after hours.

It’s a feature, not a bug

There’s no shortage of companies leveraging AI to remain profitable, to the delight of (non-Salesforce) investors:

• Wells Fargo’s CEO has touted trimming its workforce for 20 straight quarters. Its stock is up 228% over the past five years.
• Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan wasn’t hiding it during a recent earnings call when he said the company has let go of 88,000 employees over the past 15 years. BofA stock is up 95% since 2020.
• Amazon, with its share value up 28% over the past year, recently told staff that AI implementation would lead to layoffs.
• Microsoft has cut 15,000 jobs in the past two months as the company pivots to AI—and its stock is also up since the beginning of July.

Zoom out: Per HR Dive, 34% of CEOs plan to enact layoffs in the next 12 months, the fifth straight quarter that number has risen. Molly Kinder, a senior fellow at Brookings, whose expertise is in AI and the present and future of work, told the WSJ: “I don’t think that’s good news for the American worker.”—DL

Amazon nixes Prime perk that let members share free shipping. The company said its Prime Invitee program, which lets Prime members share free shipping benefits with people outside their household, is ending on Oct. 1. It’s encouraging the customers who benefited from it to get their own Prime subscriptions by offering them one for $14.99 for their first year (after that, it’s $139 annually). Amazon also encouraged current Prime members to check out Amazon Family, which lets them extend free shipping privileges, Prime Video, and other offerings to one adult, as well as teens and children, in their household.

Florida will become the first state to scrap vaccine mandates. At a press conference yesterday with Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo said that every statewide vaccine requirement, including those required to attend public schools (such as immunizations against chickenpox, polio, measles, and hepatitis B), would be removed, saying, “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.” Public health experts criticized the move, saying that it could lead to severe outbreaks among residents and tourists. Every other state in the US still currently has vaccine mandates, with varying exemptions. Last year, the CDC released a report that found routine vaccines have saved the lives of 1.1 million children in the US and $540 billion in direct healthcare costs since 1994.

Job openings declined in July and employers remain cautious, according to new data. The Bureau of Labor Statistics released last month’s JOLTs data, which tracks hiring, layoffs, and quits. The employers surveyed reported 7.2 million job openings, down from 7.4 million in June, but other key data points remained unchanged from the prior month. However, the decline in “help wanted” signs points to a softening labor market, which could influence the Federal Reserve’s rate-cut decision due later this month. “This job market is frozen and it’s difficult for anyone to get a job right now,” the chief economist of the Navy Federal Credit Union said of the findings.—HVL

A landmark court decision against the world’s biggest search engine just turned from lion to lamb: More than a year after a federal judge ruled that Google was illegally monopolizing the search market, the same judge announced unexpectedly light punishments this week that will let Google’s business proceed with minimal changes.

Its $20 billion annual deal with Apple is largely safe. Judge Amit Mehta decided that Google can keep making “default agreement” contracts, which pay device- and browser-makers, including Samsung, Mozilla, and—most of all—Apple, to make Google their default search engine (e.g., on Safari). Mehta said:

• These types of deals can proceed as long as the contracts don’t require exclusive use of Google’s products, effectively protecting Apple’s revenue and Google’s seamless access to 1+ billion iPhone users.
• His rationale was that “cutting off payments from Google” could’ve harmed or even decimated some businesses (like Mozilla).

Also…Mehta decided that Google does not have to sell off Chrome or Android, contrary to analysts’ worst fears, but he did order the tech juggernaut to share some search data with competitors. Google is planning to appeal.

Zoom out: Mehta cited recent AI advances as a reason he didn’t intervene more harshly, since Google now faces search competition from ChatGPT, Claude, and other chatbots that didn’t exist when this case was filed in 2020.—ML

You’ll have to just imagine the casino pop-up ads in the middle of a naked bootleg play now. The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) announced yesterday that the largest illegal sports streaming platform, Streameast, is dead…just in time for the NFL 2025 season kickoff today.

It garnered over 1.6 billion visits in the last year and averaged roughly 136 million monthly visits, according to ACE. The coalition said it worked with Egyptian authorities to shut down Streameast and its 80 associated domains:

• The network illegally streamed a huge range of matches and games from Europe’s Premier League and Champions League, as well as those from the NFL, NBA, and MLB.
• Streameast also showed pirated F1 races, MMA fights, and boxing matches.

Authorities raided Streameast’s offices and took three laptops, four smartphones, $123,000 in Visa cards, and roughly $200,000 in crypto wallets.

Maybe you would steal a car. It’s hard to slap a number on just how much digital piracy costs broadcast companies, but one 2025 survey from Brand Finance found that 43% of 14,000 people in 13 countries considered using an unofficial streaming service to watch games. A 2023 study from YouGov found that 11% of adults did actually pirate content in the last year, with about half of them saying they’d done so because the cost was otherwise too high.—MM

The worst, in fact, since 1981, after adjusting for inflation and excluding the pandemic years, according to a New York Times analysis of Box Office Mojo data. The outlet honed in on some interesting trends:

• Mass-marketing in our splintered media age is increasingly difficult, which in turn is making it harder for the American public to get excited about the same movie. To make up for that, Hollywood is leaning on the notoriety of franchises. But that itself presents complications.
• “Almost all of Hollywood’s franchises have been so overworked that they are delivering diminishing returns,” NYT’s Brooks Barnes and Christine Zhang noted. The data shows that this summer’s contributions to the world of Jurassic Park and the Marvel Cinematic Universe performed worse than previous iterations.

This summer’s Top 5 movies brought in just $1.6 billion, compared to last year’s Top 5, which accumulated $2.1 billion. The biggest takeaway? A significant percentage of American movie lovers may simply never go back to movie theaters.—HVL