There's multiple simultaneous narratives: the industry-wide one of slashing well-paid tech talent under the guise of AI productivity boosts, and what's actually going in at each company.

Cloudflare is an outlier because the company doesn't actually make money at present; their past three annual statements show net losses in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. Not hemorrhaging cash per se (their cash reserves alone could cover ~9 more years of losses), but still enough to warrant some cutbacks - and AI is the current scapegoat, thus they finger AI and throw folks out the door.

Coinbase's story is different: they're making good money, but their industry is inherently volatile. Again, recent volatility in the crypto markets related to...things...is dragging down long-term prospects for currencies, while ongoing trades are broadly just insiders doing insider things or exiting their positions for liquidity. Still, their share price is down 27% over 5 years and 18% YTD, so they also need to pump their share price so the executives get paid; layoffs are consistently rewarded by the shareholders, thus they axe part of their workforce for the bump and fingerpoint to AI.

Never take what a company says at face value, and always check their balance sheets. What Cloudflare did sucks but could be warranted to some degree; what Coinbase did has no justification whatsoever beyond naked greed.

Its quite filthy but it benefits them all to lay off lots of people to reset the wage rate in the market... Im sure we will see a wave of re-hiring when this stuff starts to blow over but many initially will be at a much lower wage rate.

> Cloudflare is an outlier because the company doesn't actually make money at present; their past three annual statements show net losses in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Their free cashflow is high; they're choosing not to report a profit. I don't think it's useful/accurate to say they don't make money.

Don't get me wrong, they may be doing a layoff to boost margins or enter GAAP profitability but the company revenue exceeds its operating cost by quite a bit.

See in their latest quarterly report: https://cloudflare.net/news/news-details/2026/Cloudflare-Ann...

> First quarter revenue totaled $639.8 million, representing an increase of 34% year-over-year

So they're growing 34% annually.

> Free cash flow was $84.1 million, or 13% of revenue, compared to $52.9 million, or 11% of revenue, in the first quarter of 2025. Cash, cash equivalents, and available-for-sale securities were $4,163.9 million as of March 31, 2026.

...and they have $84 million free cash flow in one quarter, and it's consistently pretty good cashflow.

And they have $4b of cash or cash equivalents stockpiled. It seems pretty healthy to me.

AI productivity is a lie. It’s AI spending because the revenue hasn’t gone up.

Employees cost money. The ZIRP free-money era has ended. Companies have been laying off tech people for the last few years.

Also the US economy is collapsing, that probably has some relevance.

You couldn't tell this by looking at the stock market.

Which is the point. There's been a concerted effort by the government to make this the story.

Layoffs and cost of living problems but you must discount the evidence of your eyes and ears and remember it's over 50,000!

The PE ratio of Tesla should tell you everything you need to know about the stock market representing actual economic conditions.

To me, it just means a dollar doesn't buy as much of IBM as it used to.

Stock market is up only because investors bet on AI, if you'll exclude AI and AI supply chain at best it would be stagnant.

Zirp ended over 4 years ago, what are you talking about, the us economy is collapsing? What? Care to elaborate on any of this?

Whenever someone brings up ZIRP, especially someone with a username like yours, it's an indicator that they have no clue what they are talking about and like to regurgitate things they read on the internet.

> Also the US economy is collapsing, that probably has some relevance.

Right...wait, what?

>especially someone with a username like yours,

> -- blingbot9 2026

a new level of ad hominem

Is Coinbase that major though? they're always doing lay-offs.

Meta's layoff was also last week, much bigger than both.

I think there's also a certain permission structure that once one sufficiently large org does a big round of layoffs and doesn't get punished, a bunch of others will run the same playbook. We've seen this before -- back in 2022 when Elon fired like half or more of Twitter and the service didn't immediately implode, it gave other CEOs permission to do massive layoffs in the guise of "efficiency" even though the real reason was ZIRP was over. Now they're claiming it's because of AI when it's really that their margins are eroding because the overall economy is slumping and they need to offset AI spend.

Coinbase for sure is driven by declining Bitcoin fundamentals and entry of other big players in the Trump inner circle. The AI narrative is a lie.

Cloudflare was overvalued and missed extreme expectations (down another 12% now).

By this time I wonder which investor still believes the AI excuse.

Coinbase lost 40% transaction revenue. The AI thing is just smokescreen

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/crypto/articles/coinbase-s...

It seems that Bill.com and UpWork, too!