"When Block’s Jack Dorsey laid off nearly half his workforce in March, citing AI coding agents, investors responded with a twenty-five percent stock price surge in after-hours trading. The market rewarded the elimination of human labor with an immediate, massive transfer of value to shareholders."
This is very common and has been since before AI, the market can see that the company has overhired and there are a bunch of people doing useless work - so when the company does some firings it's a good sign because they're turning the ship around.
Oh, bullshit. Shareholders will literally always think the company overhired. Every single person on this website has lived through at least one instance of firing an employee and distributing his workload to the leftover employees who are usually already overworked.
Shareholders see you as useless meat to dispose, the ideal number of employees to them is ZERO.
If layoffs will pump your stock, why aren't there more? Sure there are some layoffs happening, but those could just be companies that will benefit from layoffs. Certainly there could be many companies whose stock price would drop due to layoffs and those companies just haven't done that.
They don’t always think that, since sometimes share prices decrease as the result of layoffs, which would indicate they think it’s a bad decision.
The share prices are not going down because of the layoffs, the share prices are going down because the company itself is doing shit.
And guess what: stock prices going down is just reallocating capital somewhere else.