Tara Nguyen

Amazon just confirmed 16,000 layoffs but sources inside are telling me the real story is so much worse Word from three different VPs: the 16K number is just "Phase One" - internal docs show another 14,000 cuts planned for Q2 A director in AWS walked me through their new "efficiency matrix" - entire teams being replaced by 2-3 senior engineers running Claude Sonnet workflows The Alexa division got completely hollowed out. 847 engineers two months ago. 23 remaining after this week. All hardware development moved to a Bangalore team of 31 contractors with Cursor access Here's the sick part: they're making the outgoing engineers document their entire decision-making process into "knowledge transfer sessions" that are being recorded and fed directly into training datasets One L7 told me he spent his final two weeks creating detailed prompt libraries and workflow documentation. Thought he was being helpful for the transition Turns out he was literally training the AI agent that replaced his entire org The contractors offshore are using his exact prompts and shipping features 40% faster than his old team of 12 Americans ever did Internal Slack shows leadership celebrating "operational excellence" while badges get deactivated in real-time They're calling it "right-sizing for the AI era" in the all-hands But the P&L sheets I'm seeing show $280M in salary savings this quarter alone The knowledge extraction is complete If you're still at Amazon and haven't started job hunting, you're already dead

Samuel Benner, a farmer from the 1800s, published a book with market analysis on periods of panic, good times to buy, and good times to sell. 150 years later, his analysis has proven to be remarkably accurate.

S&P 500: record high Nasdaq: record high Dow Jones: record high

The Big Not-So-Beautiful Bill has officially passed both chambers. Despite a few conservative provisions, it explodes the deficit in the near term. This is Washington's MO: short-term politicking over long-term sustainability.