“It looks like you’re writing a resignation letter. Would you like help?” - Clippy Copilot

Well the parent of Bing stans (read: Microsoft) “voluntary” (lol) buyouts are back for round two… and this time, about a quarter of the company is invited. The company that gave us the Blue Screen of Death just rolled out a new “Voluntary Exit Offer” for workers in the US, Canada, India, and the UK at experience level 70 or below. According to a person familiar, roughly 60k people are eligible, or 27% of Microsoft’s 223k-person workforce. 

“Because, f*ck’em that’s why” - Satya, probably… 

Turns out Satya Severance (read: CEO Satya Nadella) still needs to slash costs so he can spend more on AI. Microsoft said in July that capex for the September quarter should top $50B, up from $34.9B a year ago, which, holy sh*t. The bulk of that goes into data centers for cloud customers like Anthropic and OpenAI. In other words, Redmond is mainlining every dollar it can find into GPUs.

Friendly reminder, Microsoft launched its first-ever voluntary retirement program back in April for ~7% of its US employees, and we said they could retire with pride (or wait to be canned in a month or two). Microsoft announced plans to lay off 4,800 people in July. So, three months.

Now, this round reaches higher, all the way to the vice president level (read: the people who used to do the firing), and there’s no target. For context, more than 30% of the people eligible last time took the money. Some marketing, sales, and engineering teams aren’t participating at all, but everyone else has until early December to decide. Anyone who says yes is out on Dec. 31 with a check, so they got that going for them, which is nice…

Per our old friend Amy Coleman, Microsoft’s “Chief Firing People Officer,” the program is about “creating greater flexibility and, where possible, more ways for employees to shape their next chapter.” Sounds legit.

Why now? Because Microsoft is increasingly charging customers out of the a$$ based on how much AI they actually use, and it’s already handed its programmers, sellers, and supply chain workers AI tools. It says it’s “observed noticeable results.” Now it wants to make sure it has “the right talent” for its next big growth opportunities. (So, what would you say… ya do here?)

Meanwhile, Alphabet and Amazon both posted negative free cash flow last quarter. Microsoft is still printing money, to the tune of $19.64B, though that was down 23% from a year ago, which, oof. Microsoft reports earnings Wednesday.

Meaning, Satya would rather pay you to leave than show Wall Street a minus sign. Of course, nobody has to take his package (ayy). It’s just that those GPUs aren’t going to pay for themselves…

Check on your Microsoft friends today.

Until next time! 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News holds positions in Microsoft, Google, and Amazon as mentioned in the article.