Welcome to Markets Desk, your midday read on what's moving the needle.
Meta is cutting ten percent of its workforce today, and Mark Zuckerberg is moving quickly to contain the fallout. In a note to staff, he said he does not expect further company-wide layoffs this year, though the damage to morale is already visible. The cuts signal a leaner, more AI-focused organization going forward.
Shifting to the broader AI labor debate, a senior Google executive is pushing back hard on doomsday forecasts. James Manyika, a senior vice president at Alphabet, said he would bet against mass AI-driven unemployment, arguing the technology will reshape roles rather than simply eliminate them. His comments land as a direct counter to executives who have floated figures like fifty percent job losses.
And on the deal-making front, Sam Altman is rewriting the startup playbook. OpenAI is offering the current Y Combinator batch two million dollars in AI tokens in exchange for equity stakes. It is an unusual structure that reflects just how dramatically AI has shifted the economics of early-stage company building, and how aggressively OpenAI is moving to embed itself at the ground floor.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
