Tuesday, July 28, 2026
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Saturday’s Financial Times carried a headline built for maximum unease: US tech giants have slashed 140,000 jobs this year, even as they pour unprecedented sums into artificial intelligence. US tech companies have eliminated close to 140,000 jobs since January, accounting for more than a third of every layoff announced nationwide, per an FT review of corporate filings and Challenger data. Look closer and the picture is more layered than the headline allows. Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet are meanwhile budgeting $725B for data centers this year, with Oracle putting up another $70B, spending that dwarfs the savings from the cuts themselves. Interestingly, the market is not entirely convinced by the framing either. Companies citing AI as a factor in job cuts have underperformed the Nasdaq by almost 10% in the 30 trading days following their announcements, suggesting the market doesn’t entirely buy the stories that the companies are telling.
Elon Musk’s interview with The Economist last week added fuel to the fire, though again, mostly through the way it was clipped and shared rather than what was actually said in full. Musk’s central claim was not that mass unemployment is coming tomorrow but that abundance itself might make the old economic logic redundant. “If you have vast numbers of robots with vast amounts of digital intelligence, you have a sort of a quasi-infinite economy,” said Musk, adding that “the future is going to be very, very different from the past.” He went further still, telling his interviewer that “money won’t matter in 2036,” because robots and AI will produce more goods and services than any person could consume, at which point currency stops being useful in his view. Whatever one makes of that timeline, it is a considerably stranger and more expansive argument than the alarmist soundbites suggested, and economists have already pushed back on the assumption that scarcity disappears for everything, not just manufactured goods.
None of this is to dismiss the underlying reality. Job displacement from AI is genuine, and history offers a useful, if uncomfortable, parallel. The Industrial Revolution brought eighty-odd years of dislocation, hardship and outright resistance from the Luddites, alongside genuine technological progress and expanding prosperity. The transition was long, and it was not kind to everyone living through it.
The forecasting bodies studying this cycle are, on balance, more measured than the headlines. The World Economic Forum expects roughly 92 million jobs displaced globally by 2030, against some 170 million created, a net gain rather than a net loss. McKinsey puts up to 30% of current work activities within reach of automation by the same date, with most workers shifting occupation rather than losing employment outright. Goldman Sachs frames the exposure in the hundreds of millions of jobs, but couples that with expected productivity gains and new employment. The OECD’s reading is perhaps the most sober: AI reshapes tasks and skills far more than it eliminates entire occupations. The consistent thread across all four is transformation rather than annihilation, though transformation carries its own costs for the people caught in the middle of it.
The sectors under most pressure are the predictable ones: administrative and clerical work, basic customer service, and rules-based banking functions such as compliance and mortgage processing. The sectors adding jobs get far less airtime: AI engineering and infrastructure, cybersecurity, data governance, healthcare roles supporting ageing populations, green energy and grid modernisation, and skilled trades that remain stubbornly difficult to automate. Electricians, plumbers, nurses and surgeons are not going anywhere.
What this means for investors is less about picking the winning theme and more about temperament. This is where the discipline of Buffett and Munger remains relevant, not as nostalgia but as a genuinely useful framework. Their edge was never speed. It was patience, an unwillingness to act simply because everyone else was acting, and a comfort with sitting still while compounding did its work quietly in the background. They read filings rather than headlines, and they were not chasing the next narrative, AI included.
That discipline matters now precisely because the AI story is loud, fast-moving and easy to misread in either direction, whether that is panic about job losses or unchecked enthusiasm about quasi-infinite abundance. The layoffs are real, the capital spending is real, and so is the uncertainty about how this all nets out over the next decade. Calm, diligent, unhurried assessment remains the more reliable formula, not because it guarantees comfort, but because it has simply held up better than the alternative over time.
We would like to thank Dominion Capital Strategies for writing this content and sharing it with us.
Sources: Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, Marketwatch, MSCI.
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