'Boom Times for the End of the World' collects passionate culture journalism from Scott Timberg, a former Times staff writer who died by suicide in 2019.
projects that may or may not pan out. they want them to reward shareholders with buybacks and big oil is certainly listening. one other important factor here, this is a notoriously boom to bust industry when times are bad, they re really bad. exxon lost $22.4 billion in 2020. some companies went out of business. but, kasie, clearly these latest numbers show that boom times are back in big oil. they certainly are. and just briefly, gas prices have been creeping back up. how bad are they getting? why are they going up under these circumstances? look at this. gas prices are ticking back up $3.50 a gallon. this is unusual at this time of year. normally demand is very weak. demand is not the issue here. it s supply. winter weather knocked out some refineries. that has caused gas prices to creep back up 28 cents in the last month, 40 cents from the low in december. the question is how much higher do gas prices go? gas puddy s patrick dahan told
before making any structural changes. but twitter isn t the only tech company seeing big changes. in the face of uncertain economic conditions, the tech industry has seen a string of lay oufs this year. our next guest writes, at least part of the surge in layoffs was self-inflicted. when the companies enjoyed soaring profits and a belief that the pandemic-fueled boom times would keep going, they aggressively expanded by hoarding the most fought-over and expensive resource in the software business talent. erin griffin from the new york times joins me. we re grateful to have you this morning. good morning. i want to start with that, the sense that layoffs are coming at a ton of different tech companies. what are you most looking out for and what strikes you the most about this news? well, we ve been seeing layoffs since the start of the year.
on zuckerberg s reality. the meta verse may have to wait. meta stock is down 70% this year. profits down 50% in the third quarter. with the economy slowing, it is squeezed by a sharp decline in advertising revenue. this is mark zuckerberg saying we grew too fast. we assumed the boom times would continue. and they haven t. this is a really tough tile right now for any ad supported platform. the inevitable happened to me. i woke up to news that i was being laid off. gutted, devastated, sobbing all morning. quick look at markets this morning. the futures board up slightly this morning following major losses yesterday on wall street. the dow dropped nearly 650 points. the nasdaq and s&p 500 both lost more than 2%. the uncertainty tied to mid terms drove the big drop as investors were hoping for a clear picture of which party