• Job cuts are continuing into 2025 following waves of reductions last year.
• Companies like Microsoft, BlackRock, and Ally have all confirmed cuts.
• See the list of companies letting workers go in 2025.

Layoffs and other workforce reductions are continuing in 2025, following two years of significant job cuts across tech, media, finance, manufacturing, and retail.

While companies' reasons for slimming their staff vary, the cost-cutting measures come amid the backdrop of technological change. Some 41% of companies worldwide are expected to reduce their workforces over the next five years due to the rise of artificial intelligence, according to a recent World Economic Forum report.

Companies like Dropbox, Google, and IBM have previously announced job cuts related to AI. Meanwhile, tech jobs in big data, fintech, and AI are expected to double by 2030, according to the WEF.

Here are the companies with job cuts planned or already underway in 2025 so far.

BlackRock is reportedly cutting 1% of its workforce

BlackRock told employees it plans to cut about 200 people of its 21,000-strong workforce, according to Bloomberg.

The reductions are more than offset by some 3,750 workers who were added last year and another 2,000 expected to be added in 2025.

BlackRock President Rob Kapito and Chief Operating Officer Rob Goldstein said the cuts will help realign the firm's resources with its strategy, Bloomberg reported.

Bridgewater is cutting approximately 90 staff

Bridgewater Associates cut 7% of its staff on Monday in an effort to stay lean, a person familiar with the matter told Business Insider.

The layoffs at the world's largest hedge fund bring its head count back to where it was in 2023, the person said.

Founder Ray Dalio said in a 2019 interview that about 30% of new employees leave the firm within 18 months.

The Washington Post is cutting 4% of its non-newsroom workforce

The Washington Post is eliminating less than 100 employees in an effort to cut costs, Reuters reported Tuesday.

A spokesperson told the wire service that the changes would occur across multiple areas of the business and indicated that the cuts would not affect the newsroom.

"The Washington Post is continuing its transformation to meet the needs of the industry, build a more sustainable future and reach audiences where they are," the spokesperson said, according to Reuters.

Microsoft is planning an unspecified number of cuts

Microsoft is planning job cuts soon, and the company is taking a harder look at underperforming employees as part of the reductions, according to two people familiar with the plans.

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed cuts but declined to share details on the number of employees being let go.

"At Microsoft we focus on high performance talent," the spokesperson said. "We are always working on helping people learn and grow. When people are not performing, we take the appropriate action."

Ally will cut less than 5% of workers

Digital financial company Ally is laying off roughly 500 of its 11,000 employees, a spokesperson confirmed to BI. The impacted employees were notified on Tuesday.

"As we continue to right-size our company, we made the difficult decision to selectively reduce our workforce in some areas, while continuing to hire in our other areas of our business," the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson also said the company is offering severance, out-placement support, and the opportunity to apply for openings at Ally.

Ally made a similar level of cuts in October 2023, the Charlotte Observer reported.

Is your company conducting layoffs? Got a tip?

If you are an employee with a tip about upcoming job cuts, please contact Dominick via email or text/call/Signal at 646.768.4750. Responses will be kept confidential, and Business Insider strongly recommends using a personal email and a non-work device when reaching out

• Ann Telnaes, a longtime Washington Post cartoonist, has announced she is quitting her position.
• She said the move came after a cartoon featuring the Post's owner, Jeff Bezos, was rejected.
• The Post's opinion editor said he disagreed "with her interpretation of events."

Ann Telnaes, an editorial cartoonist who has worked for The Washington Post since 2008, announced she was quitting her position after one of her cartoons was rejected.

The cartoon in question depicted Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and other billionaires kneeling in front of a statue of President-elect Donald Trump.

In a Substack post, Telnaes wrote that the idea behind the cartoon was to criticize billionaire tech and media chief executives she said "have been doing their best to curry favor" with Trump.

Alongside Bezos, the cartoon shows Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, and Walt Disney mascot Mickey Mouse.

"I've never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now," Telnaes wrote, adding that the paper's decision to kill the cartoon was "a game changer…and dangerous for a free press."

"As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable," she continued. "For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post."

The Post's opinions editor, David Shipley, said in a statement that while he respected Telnaes and her work for the publication, he "must disagree with her interpretation of events."

"Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force," he said. "My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition."

Jeff Stein, a White House economics reporter at the Post, reshared the cartoon and a link to Telnaes' Substack post on X.

Telnaes, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 2001, has long been an advocate for free speech and editorial cartoons as a tool for civic debate.

She serves on the advisory board for the Geneva-based Freedom Cartoonists Foundation and was formerly a board member of Cartoonists Rights.

Telnaes concluded her Substack post by quoting the Post's slogan: "Democracy Dies in Darkness."

Jeff Bezos has owned The Washington Post since 2013, when his holding company, Nash Holdings, bought the newspaper for $250 million.

Business Insider has contacted Telnaes and Shipley for comment.

• Jeff Bezos prefers "messy" meetings to rehearsed ones for genuine discussions.
• Bezos emphasized seeking truth in meetings, not polished pitches or presentations.
• His ideal meetings include six-page memos, a study period, and open, messy discussions.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos prefers "messy" meetings to ones that team members have rehearsed, he told The New York Times DealBook Summit last week.

The world's second-richest person and owner of the Washington Post said his approach to internal meetings is to not finish them until he feels that everything has been discussed.

"Messy is good," Bezos told The New York Times.

Bezos explained that most of the meetings he considers useful have six-page memos, a 30-minute "study hall" period to read them, and then a messy discussion.

"I like the memos to be like angels singing from on high, so clear and beautiful," he said. "And then the meeting can be messy."

Bezos said that internal presentations should be about seeking the truth — not pitches to him or any senior executive.

"You don't want the whole thing to be figured out and presented to you," he said, adding that he would prefer to be part of the "sausage-making" process.

"I'm very skeptical if the meeting's not messy," he said.

"Show me the ugly bits. I always ask, are there any dissenting opinions on the team? I want to try to get to the controversy," Bezos said.

"Let's make this meeting messy. Help me make it messy."

Bezos is well known for his strong views about how meetings should be run, particularly what has become known "two-pizza rule," where a meeting is limited to the number of people that could be fed with two large pizzas. He also dislikes the use of PowerPoints in company meetings.

• Some journalists are leaving their jobs and starting one-person subscription businesses.
• Jason Koebler and three other veterans of Vice Media wanted to build something bigger: an actual news site.
• They launched 404 Media in the summer of 2023. Today, it looks like a sustainable success story.

Lots of people dream of quitting their jobs and going into business for themselves. Jason Koebler and three co-workers actually did it. It looks like it's working.

In the summer of 2023, Koebler, who used to edit Vice Media's Motherboard tech section, and three former Vice co-workers launched 404 Media, a tech news site they co-own. Each of them kicked in $1,000 to get it off the ground.

Fast-forward to today, and Koebler says the company is already generating something in the $900,000-a-year range, funded almost entirely with subscriptions. Even after tech and legal costs, that's enough to call 404 a success. And that allows them to write whatever they want: Like this recent piece looking at Elon Musk and Twitter/X's involvement in the Alex Jones bankruptcy case.

This self-funded business model isn't going to work for everyone and everything. But in a grim climate for media in general and journalism specifically, it's great to hear about things that work. You can hear the entire conversation I had with Koebler on my Channels podcast; what follows are edited excerpts from our chat.

It seems like you guys are making a real business here: You can pay the four of yourselves grown-up journalism salaries.

We are. It's going better than I could have ever imagined. We're also at a point where I think we'll be able to bring new employees on.

When you launched, what did you think you'd need to do, at minimum, to keep this afloat? Did you think about a scenario where it's working, but you needed to have side gigs?

When we decided to do this, we launched in August 2023, and we told ourselves that we would do it until January.

And right after we launched, in the first couple of days, we got like 600 subscribers. We fell into this kind of middle ground — enough people signed up that there was clearly an audience, but not enough signed up where [we knew this was] definitely going to work.

It was unclear whether it was going to survive, even though the response was amazing.

But then the really cool thing was every time we had a big scoop or a big story, we got new subscribers.

Your structure is egalitarian. I'm assuming you're all getting paid equally.

We're all the same. We're all 25% owners. The management of the company has been easier than I thought that it would be. I think that if we were to grow, we would probably have to figure out how to manage new hires, and what ownership would look like then.

What happens when you guys have a throw-down and then the vote is two vs. two?

There are no votes. We told each other from the outset that anyone can veto anything. So, if any one person is like "I hate this idea," then we just don't do it.

I wanted to ask you about this great piece you wrote recently: "The Billionaire Is the Threat, not the Solution." It's a personal story about your dad who worked on the printing presses of The Washington Post for decades. And about Jeff Bezos and the non-endorsement story. Your argument is that you're going to continue to have these problems as long as you're looking for billionaires to own your media.

I agree with you. I don't think we can rely on billionaires to fund our media. And this model that you've built works for you and your three coworkers and co-owners. But it can't work for everything. What kind of journalism does your model support? What does it not support?

This sort of subscription, independent model works for us. We've created four journalism jobs. Other independent media companies have created a few dozen more. But it's still like a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket.

My theory is that there can be a lot of them. I really do think that. 7,000 people have subscribed to us. The market can support a lot more of these.

But what are the kinds of stories and projects you can't do because you don't have apparatus, staff, whatever?

I think that there's the "spend three, six, 12 months on an investigative story and then publish it and maybe it wins an award and tons of people read it — or maybe no one reads it" is a model we're not even trying to do. I think that's an important model and maybe one better suited for nonprofits and The New York Times and Washington Post.

I think the reason that it's working for us is we are breaking stories, we are telling stories, that you can't find elsewhere.