Moonshot Minute

The May jobs report was a blowout. 172,000 jobs added. Unemployment at 4.3 percent.Here is what the headlines did not tell you. Half of all industry sectors have lost jobs over the past year. The share of long-term unemployed workers rose to 27.5 percent – up from 20.4 percent a year ago. Tech layoffs have now reached nearly 150,000 people in 2026, a 44 percent increase in pace over last year. AI was the leading cause of job cuts for the third straight month.Google quietly laid off cybersecurity staff to reinvest in AI. The median job search now takes nearly three months. On Reddit, job seekers report sending over 100 applications for a single interview.The gap between reported strength and lived reality keeps growing wider.No fluff. Just what is actually happening.#MoonshotMinute #JobsReport #AILayoffs #TechLayoffs #Google #Unemployment #TheUncounted

Google quietly cut its cybersecurity team this week. The stated reason? Reinvest in AI. The irony? AI amplifies the attack surface. It does not eliminate the need for security.Broader 2026 numbers tell the same story. 97,006 job cuts in May. The highest May total since 2020. For the third straight month, AI was the leading reason cited. Tech layoffs have climbed 65 percent year over year.Meanwhile, long-term unemployment is rising. The share of workers out of work for 27 weeks or more hit 27.5 percent, up from 20.4 percent a year ago.And communities are fighting back. Monterey Park, California, just became the first US city to ban data centers by ballot initiative. 86 percent of voters approved.No fluff. Just what is actually happening.#TheUncounted #AILayoffs #GoogleCloud #Cybersecurity #JobMarket

blowout. Then the Nasdaq dropped 4.2 percent.Here is why. 60 percent of money in US stocks sits in passive funds. They don't evaluate risk. They just buy the top 10 tech names on autopilot. And those top 10 names now make up 34 percent of index profits.But the real story is circular. Google booked $29 billion in profit last quarter from marking up its stake in Anthropic — not from search, ads, or cloud. Passive money flows in. AI valuations go up. Repeat.Meanwhile, AI was the leading cause of layoffs for the third straight month. Over 97,000 job cuts in May. AI-linked layoffs in 2026 have already surpassed 2024 and 2025 combined.The gap between reported strength and lived reality keeps growing wider.No fluff. Just what is actually happening.#MoonshotMinute #JobsReport #AILayoffs #StockMarket #TheUncounted

The US economy added 172,000 jobs in May. The headlines are celebrating.Here is what the headlines did not tell you. Healthcare and government carried the load. Private sector growth remains soft. Employers announced over 97,000 job cuts in May, and for the third straight month, AI was the leading cause.The uncounted are not in the BLS revisions. They are the data scientist still serving tables. The engineer cut to fund more GPUs. The professional ghosted by an AI screener.No fluff. Just what is actually happening.Listen to Episode 21 of the Moonshot Minute podcast.#MoonshotMinute #JobsReport #AILayoffs #TheUncounted

Apollo's chief economist says there is zero evidence AI is killing jobs. The layoffs are real. The AI narrative is not holding up.This is Episode 18 of Moonshot Minute. One story. No fluff. Just what's actually happening.

Last week Meta dropped the axe. 8,000 employees terminated, many getting the news at 4 AM Singapore time. Another 7,000 forcibly reassigned to AI pods. 6,000 open roles eliminated. All while Meta posts record revenue and plans to burn up to $145 billion on AI this year.When an analyst asked Zuckerberg about ROI, he called it "a very technical question" and admitted there's no precise plan.A Gartner survey of 350 executives found that companies cutting the most people are not seeing the best productivity or profits. Real ROI comes from people amplification, using AI to help workers think bigger, not replace them. Even Sam Altman has called out the AI washing.This week a federal judge advanced the Mobley v. Workday case as a nationwide collective. A Black man over 40 with anxiety and depression, rejected from over 100 jobs by AI screening.The punchline? Zero ROI. Expensive theater. Paid for by the uncounted. The engineer training her own replacement. The applicant ghosted by a secret 2.4 out of 5 score. The thousands shuffled into survival mode.They are not obsolete. They are inconvenient to this optimization pass. You are not alone in the silence. The uncounted are getting louder.Hosted by L. David Oliver, Founder & CEO, Moonshot Consulting.📧 Full breakdown on Substack: bit.ly/moonshotsubstack𝕏 @gomoonshot 🦋 @gomoonshot.bsky.social

May 14. Cisco reports record revenue. $15.8 billion. Then cuts 4,000 people anyway. The money isn't lost. It's moving from payroll to GPUs.Two days ago, Coinbase announced the end of "pure managers." From now on, it's player-coaches and one-person AI pods. Your boss is now your competitor.Meta's next 8,000 layoffs start tomorrow. Cloudflare cut 1,100 people and its stock tanked anyway. Tech layoffs have topped 100,000 in 5 months. Profitable companies keep trading humans for servers. And investors are finally asking: does the math even work?This isn't automation anymore. This is executives rewriting the fundamental rules of a company. Flatter. Leaner. Fewer humans. More surveillance. And the uncounted left standing on a ladder with fewer and fewer rungs.The uncounted are the Cisco engineer whose job became an AI line item. The Coinbase manager whose entire layer of the org chart vanished. The mid-career professional watching the rules of work change in real time while the headlines pretend everything is fine.You are not alone in this silence. The uncounted are getting louder. The question is whether anyone is listening.Hosted by L. David Oliver, Founder & CEO, Moonshot Consulting.Follow Moonshot:Substack — davidoliver112.substack.comX — @gomoonshotBluesky — @gomoonshot.bsky.socialLinkedIn — L. David Oliver

April's jobs report told two completely different stories — depending on where you work.Healthcare, warehousing, and retail added 115,000 jobs. Headline unemployment held steady at 4.3%. The White House called it a roaring private-sector win.Meanwhile, federal jobs are down 348,000 since late 2024. The information sector dropped another 13,000. Tech is in full efficiency-purge mode — Cloudflare cut 1,100 (20% of staff), Coinbase fired 700 to go "AI-native," PayPal signaling 20% cuts over time.Over 92,000 tech jobs have disappeared in just five months of 2026. Entry-level and mid-tier white-collar roles are evaporating fastest.The labor market is "resilient" — if you work in a warehouse or hospital. Office work is bleeding out.This week's Moonshot Minute: the two labor markets nobody's talking about, and the uncounted caught in the middle.—Hosted by L. David Oliver, Founder & CEO of Moonshot Consulting.New episode every Monday at noon ET.Substack: davidoliver112.substack.comSubscribe wherever you get your podcasts.#MoonshotMinute #AILayoffs #FutureOfWork #TechLayoffs #LaborMarket #BLS #Cloudflare #Coinbase #JobMarket

Episode 14.Tesla's former HR chief says 80% of U.S. workers are at companies that are NOT hyperscalers. The AI panic is real, but it is concentrated.

The unemployment rate you hear about is 4.3%. The number they are not printing is 4.6% — the U‑4 rate that includes discouraged workers who have stopped looking because they believe no jobs exist. That number jumped 33% in three months. Meta is cutting 8,000 employees while spending $135 billion on AI. And a new class action says Eightfold AI is scoring applicants 0 to 5 using scraped social media data without telling them. This is Episode 13 of Moonshot Minute. One story. No fluff.

The March jobs report added 178,000 jobs. Unemployment ticked down to 4.3 percent. The headlines called it a rebound.But the Bureau of Labor Statistics buried a number. Discouraged workers spiked by 144,000 in a single month. That's the sharpest rise in years. They stopped looking because they believe no jobs are available.Meanwhile, Snap cut 1,000 roles. GoPro slashed 23 percent. Oracle, Amazon Fresh, Verizon quietly trimming. The script is always the same: "AI‑driven productivity."And DoorDash is paying gig workers 37 cents to film themselves folding laundry – training the AI that will replace them.The labor market is not collapsing. But it is not roaring back. The AI displacement wave is building, not breaking.Episode 12 of Moonshot Minute. No fluff. Just what's actually happening.

Oracle cut 30,000 people and filed 3,126 H-1B visas in the same breath. Marc Andreessen says AI layoffs are fake. Software jobs are at a three-year high, but the people who were fired can't get them. Episode 11 unpacks the Oracle Hangover.

Oracle fired 30,000 people at 6 AM via email. Record profits. $50 billion for AI. No manager. No phone call. Just "Oracle Leadership." This is the new normal.

A developer wrote the code that trained the model. The model got good. The developer got laid off. Then Sam Altman posted: "Thank you for getting us to this point."Anthropic's study found a 61 point gap between what AI could theoretically do and what it's actually doing. Jensen Huang says companies cutting jobs are "out of imagination." And forty percent of job changers took pay cuts of more than ten percent.The bots aren't doing the work. The humans are just being paid less to check their output.Episode 09. No fluff. Just what's actually happening.

OpenAI hired a manager to fix chaos. Alexey's agent wiped 1.9M rows. Scale AI: 2.5% success. Alibaba: 75% break old code. Gartner: half will rehire. The invisible infrastructure is the only thing holding it together. Episode 08.

A 47-year-old business writer posted on Reddit two weeks ago. She's been laid off three times. She's asking strangers what trade she can learn that doesn't wreck her joints and pays at least $70,000.She's not in the unemployment numbers yet. She will be.Brookings just published research on "adaptive capacity." Of the 37 million workers in high-exposure jobs, 6.1 million have almost no ability to adapt. Eighty-six percent are women.MIT studied 300 AI initiatives. Ninety-five percent failed to deliver measurable ROI. Ninety-five percent.And yet Meta is spending hundreds of billions on data centers. Amazon tripled capital spending while shedding 30,000 roles. A survey found 94 percent of companies will continue AI investments regardless of returns.This isn't efficiency. It's signaling. And the signal is being paid for by the people who trusted the system.Episode 07. No fluff. Just what's actually happening.

On February 28th, Claude became the number one downloaded app in America. ChatGPT dropped to number two for the first time ever.Not because Claude is better. Because millions of people made a political decision with their thumbs.Here's what happened: The Pentagon gave Anthropic an ultimatum—remove your safeguards against mass surveillance or we destroy you. Anthropic said no. OpenAI said yes within hours.Then the users spoke. ChatGPT uninstalls spiked 295% in one day. One-star reviews jumped 775%. Claude's downloads shot up 51%.Katy Perry publicly canceled ChatGPT. Google and OpenAI employees signed open letters supporting their competitor. And the market responded by making Claude number one in six countries.This week's Moonshot Minute asks the question nobody's answering: When the government demanded AI companies choose between ethics and contracts, one folded and one held. And millions of users just proved they were watching.Episode 6. 90 seconds. No fluff. Just what's actually happening.

Block cut nearly half its workforce. OpenAI raised $110 billion. Anthropic told the Pentagon no. One week. Three stories. One conclusion: the old rules are gone.Companies are smaller. Money is bigger. Governments are customers, not kings.Episode 5 of Moonshot Minute. 90 seconds. No fluff.

Sam Altman calls out companies using AI as a cover for routine layoffs. January hit 108,000 cuts — the worst since 2009 — but fewer than 8,000 were actually AI-related. Meanwhile, one in four unemployed Americans has been searching for over six months. This is Moonshot Minute, Episode 04.

Moonshot Minute is a weekly 60-second briefing where AI meets talent acquisition. One minute, one story, the signal you need while everyone else is catching up.Episode 03: The Transparency Paradox. Washington is pushing for AI layoff reporting, but AI is already deciding who gets screened, interviewed, and ghosted. The question is simple: when regulators start counting, will the numbers still matter, or will AI have already rewritten the rules?Hosted by L. David Oliver, Founder and CEO, Moonshot Consulting.

108,000 layoffs in January—worst since 2009. Tech billionaires say "study humanities, learn soft skills, you'll be fine." But their AI coding tools just crashed tech stocks by making engineers obsolete. This isn't a recession. It's a class war dressed up as career advice. Your 60-second intelligence briefing where AI meets talent acquisition.

This is Moonshot Minute. Your weekly 60-second intelligence briefing where AI meets talent acquisition.Every week: one minute, one story, the signal you need while everyone else is catching up. No fluff. Just what's actually happening.This is Episode 01.THE DATA VACUUMThis week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics delayed the January jobs report indefinitely due to the government shutdown. Translation? We officially don't know how many jobs America created last month.But here's the irony. While Washington can't count jobs, AI is making hiring decisions at warp speed.Horizontal Talent predicts that by the end of Q2, 80% of high-volume recruiting will start with AI voice screening. Not human phone calls. Not resume reviews. Algorithms.And the bigger revelation? AI just exposed what we've known all along: college degrees were always a lazy proxy for actual capability. Skills-first hiring isn't coming. It's here. The credential filter is dying faster than HR can rewrite job descriptions.So here's the question: Do we really need the government to tell us about jobs when algorithms are already deciding who gets them?That's your Moonshot Minute. The future of hiring isn't waiting for bureaucracy to catch up.SOURCES:• BLS Jobs Report Delayed - CNBC• 80% Voice AI by Q2 2026 - Horizontal Talent• Skills vs. Degrees - Staffing Industry• AI Trust Crisis - HR ExecutiveNew episodes every week. Subscribe and stay ahead.Hosted by L. David Oliver | Founder & CEO, Go Moonshot Consulting