Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, dropped a bombshell on X with a chilling sentence. Behind the irony of this tweet lies a reality that markets, businesses and workers are only just beginning to digest. The AI is no longer knocking on the door, it is already there.
In brief
- Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, posted on X: “I hope everyone is enjoying their last year of meaningful work. »
- This tweet comes against a backdrop of massive AI-related layoffs, including 4,000 job cuts at Jack Dorsey's Block Inc..
- An American analysis firm predicts mass unemployment in the United States within two years because of AI.
When a web pioneer signs the death certificate of human work
Yesterday, Chad Hurley, one of the three co-founders of YouTube, which was sold to Google for $1.65 billion, posted a cryptic but meaningful sentence on X: “ Hope everyone enjoys their last year of meaningful work! » Or, in French: “I hope everyone is enjoying their last year of useful work. »
It's difficult to know if the Californian billionaire is joking, alarmed or provoking. But the timing is anything but trivial. This tweet comes at the precise moment when artificial intelligence ceases to be a conference topic to become an economic bulldozer.
The proof? On February 26, Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, boss of Block Inc. and bitcoin maximalist, announced the elimination of more than 4,000 positions in his group, or nearly half of his workforce. Not because the company is doing badly. Block shows solid results.
Jack lays off because AI allows him to produce as much, or more, with half as many people. Wall Street immediately validated the choice: the stock jumped more than 20% in after-hours trading.
AI, a wave that no one can stop
Hurley's tweet didn't come out of nowhere. It resonates with a series of converging signals that together paint a worrying picture for the global labor market.
On February 22, 2026, Citrini Research, an American financial blog, published a 7,000-word essay imagining the state of the job market in 2028. The document describes an economy devastated by AI: a US unemployment rate climbing from 4.3% to more than 10% in the space of two years.
Discreet upon its release, the text went viral in a few hours in trading rooms and among strategists, to the point of being cited among the factors having contributed to the fall of 800 points in the Dow Jones the next day.
As for the Federal Reserve, Raphael Bostic, outgoing president of the Atlanta Fed, drives home the point an interview with Reuters : The United States could enter a period of “structurally higher unemployment” as companies substitute algorithms for white-collar workers. A statement that weighs on expectations, while the monthly report on American employment is expected on March 6.
The markets have already delivered their verdict. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq recorded their biggest monthly decline in almost a year in February. Software sector values are faltering. And according to Forresterthe American economy could lose 10.4 million net jobs by 2030.
What Hurley understood, and said with the cold irony of someone who has built his fortune on disruption, is that this time around, AI no longer complements humans. She replaces him. And the schedule is tighter than expected.
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