On May 19, Bill Winters, a chief executive at Standard Chartered Group, told a roomful of investors that AI is replacing “lower-value human capital” at the firm, which announced cuts of 15 percent by 2030. These layoffs weren’t a cost-cutting initiative: Standard Chartered hit its 2026 medium-term financial goals a year ahead of schedule. This move was just a pure replacement of human talent for its AI equivalent.
Weeks after Winters’ comments, WiseTech Global co-founder Richard White told a conference crowd that “it doesn’t take much effort to convince people … that they’re stupid to be paying $100 for labor when you can pay $2 for the AI.” Its CEO, Zubin Appoo, received a “hand-written threat of violence” containing his personal information and comments about his family.
“The tech sector, which is currently flush with investment and capital, is the ultimate example of this taken to the extremes,” said Dennis Tourish, a professor of leadership and organization studies at the University of Sussex. “With all of the money flowing into AI companies in particular at the moment, they are acquiring more and more power.”
CEOs making bold statements that drive markets—and alienate employees and the general public—may have behavioral roots that come with the role.
“People look up the hierarchy rather than down the hierarchy,” Sutton says. “That’s what baboons do, too.”
Executives across industries don’t just look up the hierarchy, they may also parrot what their peers do. “You can never underestimate the extent to which corporate behavior is imitative,” says Tourish. “Laying people off then becomes a fad—a craze.”
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince outlined which category of workers he’d made “obsolete” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Block CEO Jack Dorsey cut the company’s workforce nearly in half while bragging that AI was enabling “a fundamentally new way of working.” Mark Zuckerberg parked his $300 million mega-yacht (and two support ships) in Seattle on the same day Meta cut 1,400 employees earlier this month.
“Steve Jobs was one of the most gifted people I’ve ever seen in terms of building and designing products. He was also one of the biggest assholes I’ve ever seen in how he treated people,” says Sutton. Apple’s shareholder returns also averaged 33.6 percent per year during his tenure.
“When you treat people badly and they either get free from you, they feel shat upon by you, or you lose power—you lose power very quickly,” Sutton says. “They shove you down because they’re lying in wait.”
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