Pick Your Billionaire

How are you holding up, Hacker?

You know it was a crazy week in news when a billionaire putting 11,000 people out of work is only the 3rd worst billionaire of the week. Fighting for number 2 and 1, we have: a billionaire who botched his total net worth by 94% in one single day, screwing over entire industry and forcing his company into bankruptcy; and another billionaire who really didn’t want to buy a company for $44 billion, so much so that he’d rather watch it burn. And it's only Thursday 🤯

Mass Tech Layoffs

So it happened. The bubble bursted on big tech. Companies big & small which have overhired for 2 years during the pandemic, are now forced to make big cuts due to shrinking revenue and looming recession. This week, Meta joins a growing list of Silicon Valley companies in enforcing mass layoff (11,000 people, or roughly 13% of its workforce).

If you happen to be one of the hundreds of thousands of tech workers affected by these mass layoffs - here's our advice for you: NOW is the time to get (back) into writing! Many of our writers use HackerNoon stories as personal portfolios to apply for a job or even fundraise. So can you ⬇️⬇️⬇️

A Sad Story for Crypto

The biggest news of the week goes to the rapid & massive downfall of the world's 2nd biggest crypto exchange, FTX and its billionaire champion, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF, aka ex-crypto king), at the (alleged) hands of the (undoubtedly now) biggest crypto exchange, Binance, and its CEO CZ. At HackerNoon, we have published some articles on this rapidly developing story; however, we need YOUR input. What could this story could mean for the future of crypto and blockchain as a whole? Is FTX downfall the Lehman Brother of crypto? Did Binance CEO CZ orchestrate this whole thing?

Elon’s Twitter. Location: Hell

Lastly, Elon Musk strikes again. Yup, the world's richest man's actions this week really made us all wonder why tf did he become so rich in the first place, and bursted the myth of (any) correlation between talent and wealth. After reluctantly forced to buy Twitter for a whopping 44 billion dollars (which, btw, CZ, the Binance CEO, was also in on 👀), Elon marched into Twitter HQ with a sink, fired half of its workforce over an unsigned email, launched/re-launched then unlaunched a half-baked subscription service for 8 dollars, then announced in an emergency all-hands yesterday that "bankruptcy isn't out of the question", all the while, tanked valuation of the company from 44 billions to 8 billion in less than 2 weeks.

Read that again. We also wouldn't oppose to you screenshoting the above paragraph to motivate you whenever you think you are having a bad week. But you know what you can always do? ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Until next time - this has been HackerNoon’s Writers Note