The wave of tech layoffs is turning into a powder keg - and not just because of the numbers, but because of what's happening at the same time on the opposite end. Last month the tech sector had nearly 40,000 layoffs, the highest figure in two years, and artificial intelligence was the most commonly cited reason for layoffs across every industry, for the third month running, according to the career-transition firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Except more and more people suspect that AI is the real culprit - that it's a more convenient excuse than a real reason. Even the well-known investor Marc Andreessen called artificial intelligence „the silver-bullet excuse" for layoffs that are actually the consequence of over-hiring during the pandemic years. „Essentially, every big company is overloaded," he said. When Uber recently cut 23 percent of its HR department, the spokesperson explicitly stressed it had nothing to do with AI - but few believed it.

What makes all of this combustible is that, at the same time as tens of thousands of workers are shown the door, a small group of AI insiders is getting rich on a scale that's hard to grasp. The chipmaker Cerebras finished its first day on the stock market with a jump of 68 percent and a value of around 67 billion dollars - and the two co-founders became billionaires overnight.

SpaceX, meanwhile, went public last Friday with a value of 2.1 trillion dollars, turning Musk into a paper billionaire and creating around 4,400 new millionaires all at once. Anthropic and OpenAI are approaching the stock market at valuations of around a trillion dollars each. And Mark Zuckerberg in March bought a 170-million-dollar villa in Miami - a record for the most expensive house ever sold.

This is the equation that burns: on one side a worker without a corporate email being handed their notice „because of AI," on the other a founder who becomes a billionaire in a single day on the stock market. The technology that was supposed to raise everyone's productivity is instead concentrating wealth in the hands of a few. The question hanging over Silicon Valley isn't whether this is sustainable - it's how long people will keep accepting it as normal.