The part about satisfying shareholders is true. Many of those companies do not have the best reputation with investors right now.
For example, for the semiconductors space the absolute three best stocks to hold right now: TSM, NVIDIA and AMD are blasting off while Intel is getting absolutely annihilated. Intel’s newest CEO Lip-Bu Tan who was brought on last year has decided to stop doing fancy shyt the company has been doing the last few years and got rid of things such as their automotive division to focus on what their main direction was while leaning more into A.I.
I think a lot of these companies laying off are feeling the effects of bad leadership when they were being irresponsible with money from 2017-2021.
I know a few people working at companies whose stocks are surging and their jobs are fine. I don’t know anyone at NVIDIA, but I know they haven’t had a single lay-off the last few years. Not one.
Meta’s stock has been taking off, but they had that whole metaverse thing, so no doubt many of lay-offs were around that. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to Microsoft now that their main A.I talent got sniped by Meta.
Keeping in mind additionally the CEO’s, Board of Directors, etc. get paid in stock options so the shareholder price (relative to competition) makes sense. It’s definitely one of the main factors.