While tech companies are falling over each other to announce AI-driven layoffs, Tesla’s CEO is making the opposite promise. Speaking at the Abundance Summit on Wednesday, Elon Musk told entrepreneur Peter Diamandis that Tesla has no plans to cut its workforce. “We’re not planning any layoffs or reductions in personnel,” he said. “In fact, we will increase our headcount.”But Musk immediately followed that up with the part that reframes everything: “The output per human at Tesla is going to get nutty high.” So yes, more jobs—but each one is expected to carry a much heavier load, turbocharged by AI and Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot program.
Block axed 40% of its staff, Atlassian cut 10%—AI layoffs are now a full-blown trend
The backdrop to Musk’s comments is hard to ignore. Block, Jack Dorsey’s fintech company, this month cut around 4,000 employees—nearly half its workforce—with Dorsey openly citing AI tools as the reason. He told shareholders he’d rather restructure now than drag out painful cuts over months or years. Block’s stock jumped over 20% on the news.Atlassian, the Australian software firm behind Jira and Confluence, announced 1,600 job cuts—10% of its staff—as it restructures around AI and enterprise sales. Amazon has shed roughly 30,000 corporate roles in recent months, after CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a June 2025 memo that AI efficiency gains would “reduce our total corporate workforce” over time. Meta, meanwhile, is reportedly preparing cuts of up to 20% of its nearly 79,000-person workforce to offset the cost of its AI infrastructure push, which could reach $135 billion in capital expenditure this year.
Not all ‘AI layoffs’ are actually about AI—and executives are starting to say so out loud
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, speaking at the India AI Impact Summit last month, put a name to what many analysts had already suspected: “AI washing.” Some companies, he said, are blaming AI for layoffs they were going to make anyway. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff went further when asked specifically about Block, telling CNBC: “That company has its own unique issues. We all know that, so let’s put that aside.”The numbers back up the skepticism. Block grew from 4,000 employees in 2019 to nearly 13,000 by end of 2023—a pandemic-era hiring spree that was always going to need unwinding. Mizuho analyst Dan Dolev was blunt about it: “The vast majority of these cuts were probably not due to AI.” Altman himself acknowledged, however, that the real displacement is coming—just not entirely here yet.
Musk thinks robots will eventually make jobs optional—and wants UBI to fill the gap
Musk has long held a more radical view of where all this is heading. At the Abundance Summit, he repeated his prediction that robots will eventually take over the production of goods and services so completely that human employment becomes optional. His answer to that world: universal basic income. “We’ll basically just issue money to people,” he said, predicting that productivity would so far outpace the money supply that the result would be effective deflation—not scarcity.For now, Tesla is hiring. But if Musk’s longer-term vision plays out, that may be a temporary state of affairs.
