As was widely reported, Oracle axed an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 people via email on March 31.

One of the employees cut that day told TechCrunch about the experience: “I had, like, this weird feeling in my stomach. I went to go sign into the VPN, and the VPN was like, ‘this user doesn’t exist anymore.’ Then I called my friend, and I was like, ‘Hey, can you see me in Slack?’ And she said, ‘No, your account’s been deactivated.’”

The person soon received an email stating their role was terminated immediately. The severance offer arrived a few days later. But Oracle’s terms would quickly become a point of contention — and some laid-off employees would push back.

Oracle offered fairly standard Corporate America terms to laid off employees. In exchange for signing a release waiving their right to sue, employees received four weeks of pay for the first year, plus one additional week per year of service, capped at 26 weeks. The company was also paying for one month of COBRA insurance.  

The catch: Although stock compensation often makes up a good chunk of a tech worker’s pay, particularly at Oracle, the company did not accelerate soon-to-vest RSUs. Any shares that hadn’t vested by the termination date were forfeited.

That held true even for stock granted as retention incentives or in place of salary increases tied to promotions. One long-tenured employee lost $1 million in stock that was just four months from vesting; RSUs made up about 70% of his compensation, Time reported.

Some employees also discovered that if they were classified as remote workers by the company, and didn’t work in a state with stronger worker provisions like California or New York, the company said they didn’t qualify for WARN Act protections.  

The WARN Act is a law that requires companies conducting mass layoffs to give employees two months notice prior to letting them go. It’s triggered when 50 or more people are impacted at one location. By classifying employees as remote workers, the minimum location requirements can be sidestepped.  

Some people were unaware they were classified as remote workers, because they were near an office and worked on a hybrid schedule. 

Even if they were covered by the WARN Act, this did not necessarily extend severance, the former Oracle employee said. That’s because Oracle included the two-months’ WARN notice pay in its existing calculation of four-weeks, plus one week per year. 

For a short time, a group of employees tried to negotiate en masse with Oracle, according to a letter seen by TechCrunch. At least 90 people signed a public petition urging the database and cloud computing giant to match the terms of other big tech companies conducting mass layoffs in the name of AI. 

For instance, Meta’s severance package, according to an email published by Business Insider, started at 16 weeks of base pay, plus two weeks for every year of employment and covered COBRA for 18 months.  

Microsoft, which extended voluntary retirement offers to long-serving employees, provided accelerated stock vesting, a minimum of eight weeks’ pay, and an additional one to two weeks for every six months of service, depending on rank, the Seattle Times reported.  

And Cloudflare, which just cut 20% of its employees, offered lump sum severance that was the equivalent of base pay through the end of 2026, plus healthcare coverage through the end of the year, and accelerated vesting of stock through August 15. So if an employee was close to obtaining another tranche, they will get it.  

Oracle declined to negotiate, according to an email seen by TechCrunch. It was a take-it-or-leave scenario, the employee said. 

When asked about its severance terms, classifying employees as remote, and the failed attempt by employees to negotiate more, Oracle declined to comment.

Such a reaction from the company isn’t a surprise, not even to those who hoped to negotiate. But it does underscore that for all the theoretical high pay (often via stocks) and perks that tech workers enjoy when it’s an employees’ market, they have very few protections in place when it isn’t.

San Francisco real estate has never been very accessible. But the record sales happening right now in the city’s high-end market are testing the upper limits of what even this famously unaffordable city thought was possible.

Consider a six-bedroom, 5,700-square-foot home in Cow Hollow, one of San Francisco’s most coveted neighborhoods. It was listed two weeks ago at $7.95 million, so, not cheap. It just sold for $15 million. The sellers, who bought the property for $7.8 million in the summer of 2020 as the pandemic was pushing residents out of cities, nearly doubled their money in under five years.

San Francisco real estate agent Rohin Dhar flagged the sale on X, where it drew the kind of reactions you’d expect from people who thought they’d seen everything this market had to offer.

Then there’s a 4,100-square-foot home in Presidio Heights, one of the city’s most exclusive enclaves, that was listed in late April for $4.4 million and sold a week later for $8.2 million, nearly double the asking price. Venture capitalist Nichole Wischoff, who toured the property before it sold, wasn’t impressed with what the money was buying.

“Mediocre house, good location,” she wrote on X, noting that the view from the patio was of a neighboring home that appeared to have burned down. “Someone just bought this for $8.2M,” she wrote. “If you like to see cash lit on fire, come tour real estate in SF.”

It isn’t only the ultra-high end that’s seeing action. A 2,300-square-foot home in Bernal Heights sold this week for $4 million — a million dollars over asking — just two years after the same owners tried and failed to sell it for $2.95 million. That sale represents a different but equally telling story: the frenzy isn’t limited to the rarefied tier of eight-figure homes. Across a wide swath of the market, buyers are bidding aggressively, with homes routinely selling for $500,000 to $1 million over asking.

The numbers back up the anecdotes. New data from Redfin shows luxury home sales in San Francisco jumped 22% year-over-year in March, with homes going under contract in a median of just 12 days — down from 28 days a year earlier. Nearly two-thirds of luxury properties went under contract within two weeks. By contrast, non-luxury sales rose less than 4%, with prices essentially flat. The high end is essentially operating in a totally different universe.

The invisible force behind all of this is no mystery to anyone paying attention to the city’s tech economy. San Francisco is home to some of the most valuable private companies in the world, and their employees have been quietly accumulating — and, increasingly, cashing out — fortunes.

OpenAI and Anthropic, two of the most valuable AI companies ever created, have allowed employees to sell portions of their shares in secondary market transactions in recent years, putting serious money into the hands of people who, in many cases, already live here and want to upgrade. That liquidity is flowing directly into the housing market, and the market is responding accordingly.

The truly astonishing part may still be ahead. SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, and a cluster of other tech giants have yet to go public. When they do — and the conventional wisdom holds that some of them will, sooner than later — the wealth unlocked could make the current moment look quaint in comparison. Thousands of employees holding equity in companies valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars will become even more liquid almost overnight.

What that means for a housing market already producing $15 million sales within just a week or so of being listed is, candidly, difficult to fathom at this moment. San Francisco has spent decades as the punchline of conversations about housing affordability. It’ll be strange, to say the least, if $15 million soon looks like an opening bid.

Bloomberg has a deep dive this week into how Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan is trying to rescue one of Silicon Valley’s most storied, and stumbling, chipmakers. It’s worth a read, but it actually undersells the most jaw-dropping part of the story: Intel’s stock has risen a stunning 490% over the past year, a bet by Wall Street that may be running well ahead of the company’s actual turnaround.

Tan, who took over in March of last year, has spent much of his first year schmoozing rather than restructuring — locking in a sweetheart deal with the U.S. government (now Intel’s third-largest shareholder), cozying up to Elon Musk on a factory partnership, and reportedly landing preliminary manufacturing agreements with both Apple and Tesla.

The fundamentals are still messy. Intel’s chip yields lag well behind industry leader TSMC, and employees tell Bloomberg that Tan has been light on specifics internally, with some teams adjusting missed deadlines rather than recovering from them

But investors are betting big on the bigger picture. Whether the execution follows is the multi-billion-dollar question.