This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
Yesterday, two pieces of news dropped almost simultaneously. The first: WARN filings confirmed that the layoffs are hitting real studios — ZeniMax Online Studios (The Elder Scrolls Online) and Id Software (Doom), entire technical departments wiped out.
The second: the US Federal Reserve appointed Asha Sharma, CEO of Xbox, as an adviser to its task force on “Productivity and Jobs”, with a specific brief to study the macroeconomic impact of Artificial Intelligence. She is the only sitting CEO across all of the Fed’s task forces.
Cutting jobs on one side, being called in to advise the government on how to protect them on the other. A system working exactly as designed.
To understand why carrying out mass redundancies aligns with — rather than conflicts with — institutional recognition in corporate and financial circles, three structural factors are worth unpacking.
1. How productivity gets defined
In macroeconomic models, productivity is calculated as output per unit of labour. When leadership reduces headcount while using automation to maintain the same output, financial and regulatory institutions see a successful operational optimisation.
2. The AI integration mandate
Boards and central banks prioritise leaders with a background like Ms. Sharma’s. The primary goal is to understand how emerging general-purpose technologies can compress linear production costs and reshape future labour allocation as an asset.
Someone who has already demonstrated they can do it in-house — cutting thousands of positions while promising significantly higher output — is exactly the profile you want at a table tasked with writing the rules for everyone else.
3. The asymmetry of risk and accountability
Game developers carry product-specific risk: if the game doesn’t land, the team feels it directly and immediately.
Executives, by contrast, manage systemic risk, spread across entire portfolios and over years. In capital markets, executing mass layoffs to protect margins is codified as standard fiduciary responsibility — and that strengthens an executive’s profile for institutional and advisory roles.
The people at ZeniMax Online and Id Software spent years — in some cases over a decade — building the output that is now being measured as recovered productivity.
What remains
This divergence points to a precise structural reality: the metrics that financial systems use to reward executive performance operate in complete independence from the long-term retention of creative and technical talent, and from the moral obligations of any company.
I want to close with a line from the late Adriano Olivetti, a great Italian industrialist: “A factory cannot look only at the profit index. It must distribute wealth, culture, services, democracy. I think of the factory for the person, not the person for the factory.”