Why is there so much job instability? For the most prosperous corporations, it’s not due to a lack of profits, technology, or foreign competition. Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft laid off more than 40,000 workers in 2022-23 despite booking hundreds of billions of dollars in profits. These high-tech behemoths kill jobs because of what “the economy” means to their CEOs and to their major Wall Street investors. Their economy values higher stock prices, which translates into enormous incomes for investors and the company executives who are mostly paid through stock incentives.