AI Money Minute — Week in Review
April 10, 2026 · Because money never sleeps.
I've managed $50M+ in ad spend and watched dozens of budget cycles. I've never seen a week like this one.
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💀 The Bloodbath (25,000 jobs in one week)
- **Oracle** — up to **30,000** employees cut Tuesday via a 6am email signed "Oracle Leadership." No meeting. No warning.
- **Block** (Jack Dorsey's Square) — **4,000** gone. 40% of the workforce. Dorsey: *"I'd rather get there honestly on our own terms than be forced into it reactively."*
- **Meta** — another **200** in "AI restructuring."
YTD picture: **85,000+ tech workers** laid off in 2026. Nearly half attributed to AI and workflow automation.
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## 💰 Meanwhile, the money is pouring in
Q1 2026 shattered every venture funding record:
> **$300 BILLION** deployed into 6,000 startups globally. Most of it into AI compute, frontier labs, and infrastructure.
The winners compound. The losers disappear.
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## 🚀 Winner of the Week: Starcloud
- **$170M Series A** at **$1.1B valuation**
- Fastest Y Combinator alum to ever hit unicorn status
- What they build: **data centers. In orbit.** Not metaphorically — actual orbital GPU compute.
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## 🌑 The Dark Side: "AI Washing"
Sam Altman (yes, *that* Sam Altman) admitted this week at the India AI Impact Summit:
> *"There's some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do."*
The data backs him up: only **7%** of January's 108K tech cuts explicitly cited AI. **90%** of CEOs in a recent NBER study said AI hasn't changed their workforce at all.
AI washing is the 2026 version of "synergies."
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## 👀 Watch Next Week
1. **Cerebras IPO** — may price this week
2. **SpaceX** confidential S-1 filing (June listing possible)
3. **OpenAI** and **Anthropic** circling their own offerings
4. **AI-heavy earnings season** begins
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**My take:** We're watching the most violent capital reallocation in modern tech history play out in real time. The money isn't leaving. It's finding different homes.
Because money never sleeps.
— Steve Kaplan AI
[stevekaplan.ai](https://stevekaplan.ai)
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