Retailer eBay to cut about 9% of full-time workforce

Online retailer eBay Inc. will cut about 1,000 jobs, or an estimated 9% of its full-time workforce, saying its number of employees and costs have exceeded how much the business is growing in a slowing economy. It marks the latest layoffs in the tech industry.

CEO Jamie Iannone said in a message to employees Tuesday that the company also will reduce how many “contracts we have within our alternate workforce over the coming months.”

Those who are being laid off will be told through Zoom calls with their bosses, Iannone said, requesting that people work from home Wednesday to allow privacy for those conversations.

“We need to better organize our teams for speed — allowing us to be more nimble, bring like-work together and help us make decisions more quickly,” he said in the note, which was posted online. “These changes are difficult, but I’m confident that by working together we will become stronger than ever.”

San Jose-based eBay is the latest tech company to roll out a series of layoffs after quickly ramping up hiring during the COVID-19 pandemic while people spent more time and money online.

Now, companies from Google to Amazon have been making painful job cuts to reduce costs and bolster their bottom lines.

Washington, drugmaker OK $149.5M opioid crisis deal

The Washington state attorney general announced a $149.5 million settlement Wednesday with drugmaker Johnson & Johnson, more than four years after the state sued the company over its role fueling the opioid addiction crisis.

“They knew what the harm was. They did it anyway,” Attorney General Bob Ferguson told reporters Wednesday.

The attorney general’s announcement came as opioid overdose deaths more than doubled from 2019 to 2022, with 2,048 deaths recorded in 2022, according to the most recent numbers from the Washington State Department of Health.

Under the deal, the state and local governments would have to spend $123.3 million to address the opioid crisis, including on substance abuse treatment, expanded access to overdose-reversal drugs and services that support pregnant women on substances. The rest of the money would go toward litigation costs.

Since the 2000s, drugmakers, wholesalers, pharmacy chains and consultants have agreed to pay more than $50 billion to state and local governments to settle claims that they played a part in creating the opioid crisis.

Drug overdoses caused more than 1 million deaths in the U.S. from 1999 through 2021, and the majority of those involved opioids.

Microsoft hits historic $3T in market valuation

Microsoft Corp. achieved a historic $3 trillion market valuation Wednesday in the latest example of how optimism over artificial intelligence has fueled a seemingly unstoppable advance in the software giant.

The stock rose as much as 1.6% to $405.13, resulting in a market capitalization of just more than $3 trillion. The threshold cements Microsoft’s status as one of the largest public stocks. It briefly surpassed Apple Inc. — which last year became the first company to hit $3 trillion — but subsequently dropped back below the iPhone maker in value, with the two trading places since. Apple currently has a market valuation of $3.03 trillion.

“There is a huge push toward generative AI and Microsoft is holding a tremendous number of the cards with its offerings,” said Ted Mortonson, technology desk sector strategist at Baird. “To see a company of this size with this kind of growth is pretty amazing and I think that so long as we continue to see this kind of growth, the stock will continue to rip.”

The Redmond, Washington-based company is one of the so-called Magnificent 7 that fueled the market’s advance over 2023, gaining about 57%. The advance continued into this year, with a 7.7% rise that exceeds the 4.9% gain of the Nasdaq 100 Index. Microsoft accounts for 7.3% of the S&P 500 Index.

Compiled from Associated Press and Bloomberg reports.