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SG Scott Galloway Scott Galloway Professor of marketing at NYU Stern and author of bestselling books including The Four and The Algebra of Wealth.

“I think the headline a couple decades ago and definitely 40 or 50 years ago would have been Microsoft laying off 60,000 people. Instead, the headline is top and bottom beat from Microsoft. … The God we pray to now is shareholders.”

Pivot (Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway) · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026

“I think the headline a couple decades ago and definitely 40 or 50 years ago would have been Microsoft laying off 60,000 people. Instead, the headline is top and bottom beat from Microsoft. … The God we pray to now is shareholders.” — Scott Galloway, Pivot (Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway)

Context

Galloway on the news coverage of Microsoft offering buyouts to 60,000 employees in the same week it beat earnings. Just before, he said the AI age means a strong quarter and tens of thousands of people asked to leave.

Listen to the episode → More from Scott Galloway → More Tech Strategy & Big Tech quotes →

Transcript

Pivot (Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway) Around 36:23 into the episode
Scott Galloway

This is what marks AI age. We beat on earnings and we're asking 60,000 people to leave.

Kara Swisher

Yeah, there was a great post someone said to all software engineers 19, I don't know, 83 to 2026, you had a good run or something like that.

Scott Galloway

But the headlines, and this is where the monetization and the idolatry of the dollar and shareholder value over trumping everything in the age that is America right now. I think the headline a couple decades ago and definitely 40 or 50 years ago would have been Microsoft laying off 60,000 people. Instead, the headline is top and bottom beat from Microsoft. It's just whatever, you know, the God we pray to now is shareholders. And then Alphabet was actually a bigger story. And this was Alphabet's first top and bottom miss in nearly four years. And the stock shed 9, 10% after hours. That's the worst post-earnings reaction on record, despite revenue actually growing 25% and beating some estimates. That's how crazy the expectations have become. Yeah,

Kara Swisher

but the long-term debt thing, I think, is what freaked them out. The long-term debt jumping, the negative cash flow, even though things did grow, right? And it seems like search is something's happening with search, or it's shifting. Let's just say it's shifting.

Scott Galloway

Wall Street cash flow went negative to $9 billion in second straight negative quarter. CapEx hit get this $51.4 billion in a single quarter. That's more than Google's Cloud's entire quarterly revenue. And long-term debt is up 6X year over year from 21. So what is that? What

Kara Swisher

does Wall Street do when they see that? Is it lack of discipline or things are shifting for this company in terms of its revenue profile?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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