Daybreak - Meta fires 8,000 on a record quarter. Unacademy sells for 90% less than its peak

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

On Wednesday, Meta began firing 8,000 people.This makes up 10% of its global workforce. The cuts started at 4am on 20 May, rolling across time zones. People found out by email. Meta's quarterly revenue that same week: $56 billion. It's capex guidance for 2026: up to $145 billion, almost all of it going into AI. This is the current trend in Big Tech: record profits, mass layoffs, redirect to machines, repeat. Then, closer home: Unacademy is being sold to upGrad for $218 million — over 90% below its 2021 peak of $3.44 billion. The edtech gold rush is over and what's left is the reckoning.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Good morning and happy Friday. We've made it to the end of the week. It is 23rd of May. I am Snigda and this is Daybreak by the Kemp. So two stories from this week today. One is about one of the biggest companies in the world firing people at record scale while making record profits. And one about an Indian startup that was once worth $3.5 billion and is now being sold for a fraction of that price. Let us get into it. I want to start with the story that defined this week in tech, and one that I personally think we will be talking about years from now. On Wednesday, the 20th of May, Meta, the company that is behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, began firing 8,000 people. That is 10% of its entire global workforce gone.

The cuts started at 4 a.m. day before yesterday, rolling across time zones. And if you were affected, you found out by email. Among those let go were people from Meta's integrity team, which is the group responsible for removing hate speech and malicious content, and also cyber security staff and content designers. Now, here is the part that should make you sit up.

This has happened soon after Meta reported quarterly revenue of $56 billion, which is a 33% jump in sales. These are record numbers. So basically the company is, by every financial measure, one of the most profitable companies on earth right now. It is not struggling. So why are 8,000 people losing their jobs? The answer is sitting right in the CAPEX numbers.

Meta has raised its spending guidance for 2026 to between $125 to $145 billion, almost double of what it spent last. year. And virtually every dollar of that is going into AI. Data centers, Nvidia chips, custom silicon, infrastructure. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is personally recruiting AI researchers with compensation packages reportedly reaching $100 million apiece. Meanwhile, the same company is cutting median employee compensation by $30,000 and trimming annual hikes. And there is one detail that really captures the mood inside meta right now. The company launched an internal AI tracking program that monitors employee actions.

And this, they say, is to train its own AI models. More than 1,500 employees signed a petition against it. One anonymous policy employee told Wired that morale is low because workers feel like they are being used to train the AI models that will replace them. But zoom out and you'll notice that meta is just the most visible example of a much bigger pattern at play this month. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta combined are now planning to spend $725 billion on capital expenditure in 2026. $725 billion. This is up by 77% from last year's already record.

410 billion. Microsoft alone, 190 billion. Amazon, 200 billion. These are numbers that dwarf the GDP of so many countries. At the same time, more than 80,000 tech workers have been laid off in just the first quarter of 2026. This is already close to half of all of last year's total cuts. It is almost like some kind of a loop.

Once you see it, you can't unsee it. Record profits, fire people, take that money, redirect it to machines and chips and data centers, and use those machines to make more profit, repeat. Currently, there are 275,000 AI-related job postings sitting open in the United States alone, while the workers being laid off in customer support, content moderation, quality assurance, middle management, largely do not have the skills to fill them. So the people losing jobs and the people being hired are almost entirely different people. Now, you might ask, is anybody paying attention to this?

Any government regulator, policymaker? The answer, honestly, is not really. At least not in a systematic way. Big Tech is essentially making a unilateral decision about the future of work itself, spending at a scale and speed that no government can match, restructuring entire industries before any labor law or social safety net has the chance to adapt. Wall Street analysts are already projecting that combined AI CAPEX could cross $1 trillion in 2027. The investment is only accelerating.

So the question for all of us, and especially for a country like India, where IT employment is a pillow of the middle class, is this. At what point does someone in power decide that this needs a response? Not to stop AI, of course, that ship has sailed, but to figure out who cushions the landing for the people who are being made redundant in real time with a 16-week severance and an email at 4 a.m.? So that is the story of meta or big tech right now. And now closer to home. In 2021, Gorov Manjal was the face of Indian.

Indian EdTech's golden age. Anacademy was valued at $3.5 billion nearly. Softbank, Tiger Global, Temasek, the biggest names in global venture capital all had written it checks. Manjal was everywhere on podcasts on Twitter, talking about disrupting education for a billion Indians, and this week, his company, the same company, is being sold to a smaller rival for $218 million. pending a regulator's approval.

Upgrad has filed with the Competition Commission of India seeking approval to acquire Anacademy in an all-stock deal valued at around over 2,000 crore rupees. The deal has not yet closed, but the direction is pretty clear and the number it puts on the table is actually the real story. In August 2021, Unacademy raised $440 million in a single list. round, led by Temasek with SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Tiger Global and General Atlantic, at a valuation of nearly $3.5 billion. Across 13 rounds, the company raised a total of $880 million.

This proposed acquisition values it at $280 million, and that is a fall of over 90% from its peak. So, the obvious question is, how did this happen? You see, an academy was built for a world that briefly existed and then vanished. During the pandemic, millions of Indian students moved online. Investors started pouring in money and the company hired aggressively, spent a lot of money on marketing and expanded into offline centers later. Then, classrooms reopened and the money dried up. and then the revenues that had once justified a $3.5 billion dollar valuation just did not hold.

By the financial year 2025, operating revenue had dropped 16% year on year to 702 crore rupees and the company is now targeting around 400 crores for 2026, which is barely half of what it made the year before. Now, consider who is buying. Upgrad is led by Ronnie Screw Waller and it is not a glamorous acquirer as such. It posted a provisional profit after tax of less than 40 crore rupees in the 11-month period ending in February 26 compared to a loss of over 270 crores in the financial year 2025. It survived by not overreaching. And the reports indicate that a key attraction of the unacademy deal is unacademy's cash. Apparently, its reserves of over 900 crore

rupees are expected to strengthen Upgrad's balance sheet upon the deal closure. The acquirer Upgrad wants the target partly for what is sitting in its bank account and that tells you everything. And if you step back a little and look at the broader picture, by Jews, once India's most valuable

startup at $22 billion is mired in insolvency proceedings in both India and the US right now. Physics Walla, the scrappy YouTube upstart that nobody was betting on earlier, went public and had a roaring IPO debut. An unacademy, the darling of the 2021 boom, is looking for a lifeline from a smaller rival. The CCI, of course, will have its say, but whatever it decides, the air tech cold rush is definitely over. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news, What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts.

To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Snitha Sharma and edited by Rajiv C.N.