Amazon ‘to lay off 10,000 employees’ as Bezos vows to give away his $124bn fortune

The retailer becomes the latest mega-cap tech company to cut staffing

Amazon is planning to axe thousands of jobs this week, according to a new report.

Up to 10,000 staffers will be cut from Amazon’s devices organisation, retail division and human resources, according to the New York Times.

The layoffs, which are yet to be confirmed by the company, would represent the biggest cuts in the company’s history, and account for approximately three per cent of its corporate workforce.

In an interview on CNN on Monday, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said he planned to give away the majority of his $124bn fortune during his lifetime.

“The hard part is figuring out how to do it in a levered way,” Mr Bezos told CNN in a joint interview with his wife Lauren Sanchez. “Building Amazon was not easy. It took a lot of hard work and very smart teammates. And I’m finding - and Lauren’s finding - that philanthropy is very similar. It’s not easy. It’s really hard.”

The billionaire announced that he was giving $100m to charities chosen by Dolly Parton over the weekend, but didn’t specify how or to whom he would donate the remainder of his wealth.

Jeff Bezos and wife Lauren Sanchez said they planned to give away the majority of their fortune in an interview on CNN (CNN)

Mr Bezos made a similar no-strings attached grant to chef José Andrés and Van Jones last year.

Amazon became the latest mega-cap tech company to slash its workforce, after similar moves by Meta, Facebook’s parent company, Twitter, and other Silicon Valley firms. According to the site layoffs.fyi which tracks job cuts in tech, more than 120,000 employees have been laid off so far in 2022.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment by The Independent.

The Times reported that the precise number of jobs being cut was “fluid”.

The cuts would come during the critical holiday shopping period, when the company has previously increased staff levels to meet Christmas demand.

Shares of Amazon are down nearly 40 per cent this year, and the company’s market cap briefly fell below $1 trillion for the first time since April 2020.