Google’s parent Alphabet faced a call from a large shareholder on Tuesday to cut its soaring headcount and slash high salaries paid to non-engineers, in the latest sign of the pressure building on the biggest US tech companies to overhaul their businesses for an era of slower growth.
TCI, a hedge fund that said it owns about $6bn of Alphabet shares, called for “aggressive action”, including a dramatic cut in Google’s long-running investment in driverless cars and a big increase in share buybacks.
The hedge fund’s call, in a letter to chief executive Sundar Pichai, came the day after reports that Amazon was preparing to cut about 10,000 jobs from its corporate organisation, or roughly 3 per cent of the total. Meta, parent of Facebook, disclosed plans for a more swingeing 13 per cent cut last week as it deals with falling advertising revenue and the high costs of building the metaverse.