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microsoft
After Tens of Billions in Stock Buybacks, Microsoft Announces Mass Layoff of 4,800 Workers
"Seeing such strong numbers coupled with the mass layoffs at Xbox is not sitting right with many," wrote one tech journalist.
Jul 06, 2026
President Donald Trump has touted his massive corporate tax breaks in 2017 and 2025 not just as handouts to the rich, but as boons for their employees, who could expect to see rising wages and job growth in the coming years.
But one of the policy's biggest beneficiaries, Microsoft, just announced it was laying off thousands of employees in a move described as "cost-cutting," even though the company has spent tens of billions of dollars buying back its own stock.
When Trump's 2017 tax law reduced the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, Americans for Tax Fairness estimated that the company was saving about $16.5 billion per year.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed last July, rewrote rules to benefit companies investing in artificial intelligence by allowing them to deduct the cost of data centers and other equipment up front rather than spreading the deductions out over time, and introduced new deductions for research and development expenses.
For Microsoft, which pledged roughly $80 billion globally toward AI data center investment last year, that could translate to up to $16.8 billion in near-term federal tax savings.
The added windfall has been great for Microsoft shareholders. From 2018-25, the company returned roughly $139.5 billion to shareholders through stock buybacks since the Trump-GOP tax cut took effect, according to shareholder reports.
In the first nine months of fiscal year 2026, the first since the new tax breaks went into effect, the company bought back another $13.3 billion, an acceleration from the previous year, according to a form filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
At the same time as the company is ramping up AI investment, however, it is laying off employees.
On Monday, the company announced that it was shedding roughly 2% of its global workforce, eliminating about 4,800 jobs—mostly in its Xbox division—as it allocates more money and resources to the AI arms race.
They are among the more than 20,000 Microsoft employees who have been shown the door since 2025. Additionally, thousands more employees took voluntary buyouts this spring.
Microsoft executive Amy Coleman attributed the cuts to a changing technological landscape.
"Our customers’ needs are shifting, the business models that serve them are shifting, and that means the work itself—what we do, where we focus, and how we’re organized—has to transform too,” she said. “Companies don’t get to choose whether their industry changes; they only get to choose whether they change with it."
She also stressed that workers were “not being replaced by AI.”
But Eddie Makuch, a writer at GameSpot, noted that the company has been doing terrifically, and despite falling share prices over the past year, remains "the No. 4 biggest company on Earth with a market cap of more than $2.8 trillion."
"Microsoft stockholders might not have been happy with the company’s share price falling, but for the past quarter alone, Microsoft paid out $10.2 billion to shareholders via dividends and share repurchases," he wrote. "These are signs of strength and health for Microsoft. Xbox is a very small piece of Microsoft’s overall business, but seeing such strong numbers coupled with the mass layoffs at Xbox is not sitting right with many."
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Americans Agree: The Government Shouldn't Use AI Tech to Spy on Us
What is lacking is any action by Congress to protect our rights. Do we want to live in a country where our fundamental rights depend on the terms of service of powerful technology companies?
Mar 20, 2026
Americans, it turns out, have a clearer view of the AI surveillance debate than most of Washington. A new poll from Americans for Responsible Innovation finds that 76% of Americans oppose allowing the government to force AI companies to hand over unrestricted access to their technology for surveilling citizens. The public, in other words, increasingly understands that our Fourth Amendment protections are under threat.
What is lacking is any action by Congress to protect our rights. Do we want to live in a country where our fundamental rights depend on the terms of service of powerful technology companies? The fight over whether the Pentagon should be able to use frontier AI for mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons has clarified the challenges we all face, especially under an administration with scant regard for the law.
It’s commendable that Anthropic took a principled stance and said no to the Department of Defense (DOD). But it is an outlier, for now. Others, like OpenAI, are eager to profit from the billions in government contracts and swooped in to replace Anthropic.
Frontier AI model companies are also only one part of enabling even more domestic surveillance of US citizens. Other companies, such as Microsoft and Amazon, provide critical infrastructure for AI models. For example, every query the Pentagon runs through GPT, every bulk data analysis, every AI-assisted profile of an American citizen that touches OpenAI’s models runs on Microsoft’s Azure cloud.
American citizens and consumers understand what is at stake here, and that is why an overwhelming majority oppose giving the government unchecked surveillance power.
OpenAI and Microsoft jointly confirmed on February 27 that Azure remains the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI’s APIs, and that any collaboration between OpenAI and a third party, including for government use, is hosted on Azure. Microsoft is the infrastructure. And infrastructure is where surveillance lives. Other companies like Palantir use these models to build surveillance tools. Palantir reportedly has signed a billion-dollar contract with the Department of Homeland Security.
These companies hide behind terms of service, which they claim will stop the government from surveilling US citizens. But these are empty worlds.
OpenAI agreed to DOD terms when Anthropic wouldn't, and then scrambled to dress up the deal with reassuring language after the backlash nearly buried it. Sam Altman himself admitted the whole thing was “rushed” and that “the optics don’t look good,” which is one way to describe handing the Pentagon sweeping AI capabilities while your competitor gets blacklisted for insisting on civil liberties protections.
When The Guardian reported in February that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had more than tripled the data it stores on Azure in just six months, from 400 terabytes to nearly 1,400 terabytes, while deploying Microsoft’s own AI tools to search and analyze images and video, Microsoft responded with a one-liner: Its policies and terms of service “do not allow our technology to be used for the mass surveillance of civilians,” and the company does “not believe ICE is engaged in such activity.” That’s it. That is the entirety of Microsoft’s public position on AI-powered government surveillance in 2026: a terms-of-service claim and a profession of ignorance about what its own customer is doing with its own platform.
This is in contrast to the position Microsoft took in Israel, where last September Microsoft terminated access to Azure for an Israeli military intelligence unit after reporting confirmed the platform was being used for mass surveillance of Palestinians. The company’s president, Brad Smith, then declared that Microsoft prohibits its technology from being used for mass surveillance of civilians “in every country around the world”...except the US it seems.
These companies’ positions are strategically convenient and profitable for them, but untenable for all of us. Legal experts have spent weeks explaining why OpenAI’s revised contract language is insufficient to prevent surveillance, because the operative standard is “consistent with applicable law,” and the US government has historically interpreted that standard to accommodate sweeping surveillance programs.
The same applies to the terms of service of cloud service providers like Microsoft and Amazon. Have these changed substantially since the Snowden revelations that the National Security Agency was conducting mass digital surveillance? Instead of backing down, Amazon, for example, is extending this digital surveillance network into the real world via its Ring service. Dario Amodei is right, what’s at stake now is much larger—“a true panopticon on a scale that we don’t see today, even with the CCP.”
American citizens and consumers understand what is at stake here, and that is why an overwhelming majority oppose giving the government unchecked surveillance power. That kind of consensus is rare in American politics, and it cuts across partisan lines. Congress should act, and companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and the frontier AI companies should be on notice.
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'Make Corporate Complicity Unprofitable': Boycott Targets Companies Tied to ICE
"We cannot out-organize a fascist administration while simultaneously bankrolling the companies profiting from its cruelty," said the head of Beyond the Ballot.
Nov 25, 2025
A Gen Z-led advocacy group fighting for working-class priorities on Tuesday announced a boycott campaign targeting major corporations "that enable, profit from, or directly collaborate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the broader racist policies of the Trump administration."
Beyond the Ballot launched "Not With My Dollars: ICE Out of My Wallet" as President Donald Trump's violent crackdown on immigrants in diverse communities across the United States continues and just days before Black Friday kicks off the winter holiday shopping season.
"We cannot out-organize a fascist administration while simultaneously bankrolling the companies profiting from its cruelty," said Victor Rivera, the organization's executive director, in a statement. "Every dollar spent at a complicit corporation is a dollar funding the abduction and disappearance of our neighbors. It’' time to make corporate complicity unprofitable, for good."
The group is taking aim at e-commerce behemoth Amazon and its grocery subsidiary, Whole Foods; tech giants Dell and Microsoft; Home Depot; streaming platform Spotify; and retail chain Target. The boycott webpage explains the reason each is listed, actions shoppers should take, and the campaign's demands. In some cases, it also offers alternative companies.
Target is under fire for its "broad range of cooperation with the Trump administration's racist policies." The campaign is calling on the company to not only publicly commit to refusing collaboration with ICE but also immediately reinstate its scrapped diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.
Spotify is on the list for airing ICE recruitment ads—a decision that also recently prompted a boycott call from the group Indivisible.
The campaign site calls out Home Depot because it has "repeatedly allowed ICE agents to patrol and detain workers and customers in its parking lots and stores, usually without presenting judicial warrants or establishing probable cause," and demands an end to those practices.
The group is urging Microsoft to end its "$19.4 million contract with ICE to provide artificial intelligence capabilities and processing data." The Dell section highlights that it has provided $18.8 million to "support the office of ICE's chief information officer through the purchase of Microsoft enterprise software licenses," and similarly calls for terminating that contract with the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The Amazon section states:
REASON: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the digital backbone of ICE's machinery, selling the cloud power that helps track, target, and tear families apart.
ACTION: Stop shopping on Amazon where possible; cancel Prime subscriptions if feasible; push universities, unions, nonprofits, and campaigns to move off AWS when and where feasible, and to issue statements condemning Amazon’s role in corporate-sponsored mass deportations.
DEMAND: End all ICE/DHS immigration enforcement contracts and data hosting that enable deportations; adopt a binding human-rights policy banning support for immigration policing.
ALTERNATIVES: Bookshop.org and local bookstores; direct-from-brand purchasing; cooperatives; independent retailers.
The site also stresses that "every dollar spent at Whole Foods directly strengthens Amazon, whose AWS platform is the digital backbone of ICE's machinery, powering the tools used to track, target, and tear families apart."
While the campaign is beginning just before Black Friday, boycott organizers aim to ensure it will "not disappear" after this week.
"Unlike other consumer boycotts, Not With My Dollars is designed for long-term pressure and escalation," Beyond the Ballot said. "To be removed from the boycott list, each targeted corporation must fulfill the specific demands outlined for its company. Anything less is not accountability, just more corporate PR."
"If you bankroll a violent, unaccountable agency that terrorizes our communities, you will not do it with our money," the group added. "Across the country, poor and working-class migrant families are facing a wave of state-sponsored abductions, violence, and political policing under the fascist Trump administration. Corporations that choose to partner with, advertise on, bankroll, or provide critical infrastructure to ICE are not neutral; they are complicit."
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