# Fire Humans, Hire GPUs > Waymo closes a $16 billion round, PayPal fires its CEO mid-earnings call, and Zuckerberg's leaked emails expose the strategy of not looking. - Canonical: https://siliconvalleyconfidential.com/en/dossier/fire-humans-hire-gpus/ - Site: Silicon Valley Confidential (https://siliconvalleyconfidential.com) — weekly executive intelligence on Silicon Valley and global tech - Author: Jose Luis Cases (https://es.linkedin.com/in/jose-luis-cases-lozano) - Language: en - Published: 2026-02-07 (original LinkedIn edition: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/despides-humanos-contratas-gpus-jose-luis-cases-plnje/) --- MY TAKE --------------- This week has been bloody. There's no other way to put it. Earnings season has turned Wall Street into a slaughterhouse: Amazon -8%, PayPal -19%, Alphabet announcing it will spend around $175-185B in CAPEX. And meanwhile, leaked Zuckerberg emails reveal the guy literally argued that Meta should research the harms of its platforms less because "Apple doesn't study any of this." In other words: if nobody looks, the problem doesn't exist. Zucky disgusts me a little, why deny it. Salesforce has lost its third key executive in three months. Three. The CEO of Tableau, the CEO of Slack, the CISO. Nobody's talking about this, but when the captains abandon ship this fast, something smells rotten. PayPal fired its CEO the same day as earnings. In the middle of the call. That's not restructuring, it's classlessness and fear. And the money... Waymo has closed the largest round in autonomous vehicle history: $16 billion. Sixteen billion. Meanwhile, Humane AI Pin dies, sold to HP for half of what it raised. The perfect contrast between "right timing" and "a product nobody asked for." The macro signal of the week: Big Tech isn't in financial crisis. It's redistributing capital from people to machines. Amazon cut 769 jobs in the Bay Area alone this week. Meta laid off around 1,500. Instagram told its people it's back to the office 5 days a week. All while announcing record AI investments. The pattern is clear: fire humans, hire GPUs. Thanks for reading. If this brings you value, share it. If you want more detail, keep reading. THE BOMBSHELL OF THE WEEK --------------------- ### Zuckerberg exposed: "Apple doesn't study any of this" On February 6, confidential Mark Zuckerberg emails were unsealed in a court proceeding. And they're devastating. In one of the emails to top leadership, Zuck literally wrote: "Apple doesn't seem to study any of this. They don't have anyone reviewing or moderating content, they don't even have a reporting flow in iMessage." Translation: "If Apple doesn't research the harms of its platforms and they're doing fine, we shouldn't either." The context: the Wall Street Journal had published that Meta knew Instagram was "toxic for teens." Zuckerberg's response wasn't "let's fix this," it was "let's stop looking." Why it matters NOW: these emails were unsealed the same week Meta laid off 1,500+ people and completely dismantled its Responsible AI team. Meta's Responsible AI division was once the largest AI ethics team in the industry. Today it doesn't exist. The pattern: less research = less evidence = less liability. It's so cynical it's almost elegant. ### SALESFORCE IS BLEEDING OUT ### Third key executive in 3 months. Nobody's talking about this. Ryan Aytay, CEO of Tableau, announced his departure on February 3 after 19 years at Salesforce. Tableau was acquired for $15.7 billion. No successor has been named yet. This comes after: * Denise Dresser (CEO of Slack) left for OpenAI * Salesforce's CISO also walked * Now Aytay Three executives from units acquired for $40B+ combined. In three months. What you won't read anywhere: on Blind, Salesforce employees report "monthly layoffs kept small so no alarms go off." Salesforce eliminated 4,000 support roles with AI and now acknowledges internally that they "massively overestimated AI's capabilities." The hidden signal: when you eliminate 4,000 jobs betting AI can do the work and then admit the AI can't... the jobs no longer exist and the AI doesn't work either. You lose both. ### PAYPAL: EXECUTION LIVE ON AIR ### CEO fired the same day as the earnings call. -19% in one session. On February 3, PayPal presented Q4 results: * Revenue: $8.68B (vs $8.8B expected). Miss. * EPS: $1.23 (vs $1.28 expected). Miss. * 2026 guidance: disappointing. * CEO: fired. On the same call. The stock fell 19% in a single day. Changing CEOs the same day you report earnings is the definition of institutional panic. It's not a planned transition. It's not "orderly succession." It's a board that looks at the numbers, looks at the CEO, and says "out, now." The signal: PayPal has spent years selling the "recovery" narrative. This week that narrative died. -19% is the market saying "we don't believe you anymore." ### INSTAGRAM GOES BACK TO 1995 ### Mosseri orders 5 days in the office. New York exempt "for space reasons." Effective February 2, Adam Mosseri has ordered a full return to office for all Instagram employees in the US. Five days, assigned desks, no exceptions. Well, one exception: New York is exempt due to "space limitations." Translation: they don't have enough desks in NYC. Which is fascinating, because it means one of two things: either they didn't plan this, or it's a deliberate attrition strategy. You force people to come back, but you don't give them a seat. Those without a desk will leave on their own. On X, employees are calling it a "regression to 1950s norms." Context: this lands the same week as the Zuckerberg emails, the 1,500 Meta layoffs, and the dismantling of Responsible AI. Meta is in full purge mode. MONEY TALKS --------------- ### Waymo: $16 billion. The largest round in autonomous vehicle history. On February 2, Waymo closed a $16B round. Sixteen billion dollars. Post-money valuation: $126 billion. The investor list reads like Silicon Valley's hall of fame: a16z, Fidelity, Silver Lake, Tiger Global, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins. Everyone wants in. The numbers: * 15 million trips completed in 2025 * Expansion to 10+ US cities * London as the first international market The signal: when a16z AND Sequoia AND Tiger Global compete to get into the same round, it's not a normal deal. It's a "winner take all" bet. The VCs believe Waymo has won the robotaxi race and want to be on the right side of history. ### Fundamental: $255M Series A. From stealth to unicorn. Announced February 5. A San Francisco startup with a model they call "Nexus" (Large Tabular Model). It processes structured data deterministically, not probabilistically. The interesting part: the CEOs of Perplexity, Wiz and Brex invested as angels. When three unicorn founders put their own money into your Series A, it's because they've seen something the market doesn't see yet. They already have seven-figure contracts with the Fortune 100. Oak HC/FT leads. ### Goodfire: $150M to "interpret" AI. Eric Schmidt invests. Announced February 5. Valuation: $1.25 billion. An AI lab focused on reverse-engineering models. The question they're trying to answer: why a model makes each decision. The stat that blew my mind: using their interpretability techniques, they've identified previously unknown Alzheimer's biomarkers. They didn't design a medical model. They simply looked inside an existing model and found things humans hadn't seen. B Capital leads. Eric Schmidt among the investors. Registered as a public benefit corporation. ### PRODUCT SECRETS ### OpenAI launches Frontier: the platform that wants to be the "AWS of AI agents" On February 5, OpenAI launched Frontier, its enterprise platform for building, deploying and managing AI agents. The first customers: Intuit, State Farm, Thermo Fisher, Uber. What makes it different: it works with agents from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic simultaneously. In other words, OpenAI is building a platform where you compete with your own rivals. It's a smart move: if you're the infrastructure, you win even if the winning model isn't yours. Claimed results: production optimizations from 6 weeks down to 1 day. The signal: OpenAI has stopped competing on "best model" and is competing on "best platform." It's the same play Amazon made with AWS. It doesn't matter who wins the model war if you're the battlefield. ### Adobe Animate: they kill it, they resurrect it, and nobody knows what happened On February 2, Adobe sent emails announcing the discontinuation of Animate on March 1. The animation community exploded. In less than 48 hours, Adobe backtracked: Animate moves to "maintenance mode" instead of a full shutdown. The lesson: you can kill products quietly, but not when your user base is organized and has Twitter. Adobe underestimated the reaction and had to make the most embarrassing U-turn of the month. REAL NUMBERS -------------- ### Earnings season: the week of truth This week has been a massacre in earnings. Here's the real data vs the corporate narrative: Amazon (Feb 5): Earnings miss. Guidance of $200B in capex for 2026. Stock -8%. And meanwhile, 769 jobs cut in the Bay Area alone this week. When a company says "operational efficiency" while simultaneously announcing $200B in spending, what it means is "we're replacing people with data centers." Alphabet (Feb 4): Google Cloud grows +48%. Sounds incredible. But 2026 capex is $175-185B, nearly double 2025. Stock -4%. The market is saying: "the results are good, but the spending scares us." When you double capex and the market punishes you even as you grow, something doesn't add up. PayPal (Feb 3): Revenue $8.68B miss. EPS $1.23 miss. CEO fired. -19%. I said it above. Execution live on air. Qualcomm (Feb 4): Q1 2026 guidance "well below expectations" on revenue and EPS. The global memory shortage is hitting production. The promised "smartphone recovery" isn't coming. Stripe: 409A valuation: $106.7B. February secondary market: $91.5B. A $15.2B gap. Revenue: $19.4B (+17%). Net margin 10.6%. The numbers are good, but when your official valuation and the secondary market differ by $15B, someone is lying. ### THE DRAMA ### Epstein files: new batch reveals a Silicon Valley network On February 3, a new release of documents from the Epstein case revealed deep connections to tech billionaires and Bay Area VCs that weren't publicly known. Private emails. Dinner plans at top San Francisco restaurants. At least one prominent VC had stayed completely off the public radar until this week. I'm not going to speculate about names. But the fact that documents keep coming out and new Valley names keep appearing... says a lot about the real extent of the network. ### Washington Post cuts its Silicon Valley coverage in half On February 5 it was revealed that the newspaper owned by Jeff Bezos has reduced its technology, science and business team from 80 to 33 people. Journalists covering Amazon, AI, internet culture and investigations have been laid off. The irony is so thick you could cut it with a knife: the paper's owner is the founder of Amazon. And just when Big Tech is more powerful than ever, the journalism that watches it is disappearing. I don't believe in conspiracies. But I do believe in incentives. And the incentives here are crystal clear. ### THE WEEK AHEAD 1. February 14: Tesla FSD deadline. Last chance to buy the perpetual license at $8,000. After that, subscription only at $99/month. Watch last-minute purchase volume. 2. Earnings season continues: after Amazon -8%, PayPal -19% and the Alphabet capex shock, watch for a chain of profit warnings. 3. Salesforce without a successor: three key executives lost in 3 months. No successor for the Tableau CEO. Wall Street is going to ask: "Who's running the $30B+ acquisition units?" 4. Meta in purge mode: 1,500+ layoffs, leaked Zuckerberg emails, Instagram's RTO mandate. The coming weeks will reveal whether this is restructuring or cultural implosion. 5. OpenAI vs Nvidia: Jensen Huang publicly denied the drama on February 3, but OpenAI is seeking alternative chips from AMD and Broadcom. The technical dispute (SRAM vs external memory) hides a larger strategic conflict. Thanks for reading.