Speculations That IBM's CEO is on His Way Out
Booster of slop. Someone needs to explain to him that a million-word book only one person reads (the person who produces it using LLMs) won't have impact greater than 10-word messages a million actual humans read. Likewise, with quantum computing/computers (QC), unless they actually do something that traditional [sic] computers are unable to do at the same budget, they won't sell, they will at best become a museum exhibit.
IBM has mass layoffs, but the media is not covering this. Sadly this says a lot more about the state of the media than it says about IBM.
Recently, for political reasons, IBM made some headlines, as we noted last week. This got published just over a day ago:
In 2025—not long after Trump fired off executive orders that targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the workplace—the Justice Department announced the Civil Rights Fraud Initiative. Its purpose was to investigate companies and academic institutions that accepted money from the government, by invoking a federal law called the False Claims Act. This past week, IBM agreed to pay $17 million over claims that its DEI programs allegedly violated the law—the first instance of an employer settling a case that the government brought under this initiative.In the settlement agreement, the federal government argued that as a federal contractor, IBM was required to comply with anti-discrimination protections under civil rights law. The government identified DEI programs that allegedly took demographic background into consideration when making employment decisions, including a “diversity modifier that tied bonus compensation to achieving diversity targets” and the use of “diverse interview slates” as part of the hiring and promotion process. The agreement also noted that it was “neither an admission of liability by IBM nor a concession by the United States that its claims are not well founded”—despite the fact that IBM had altered or ended some of the programs that were under fire.
They partly relied on (leaked) footage of IBM's CEO proudly stating they were hiring based on race and gender. Many people inside IBM found it offensive because they felt like the RAs targeted them for being of the "wrong gender" and/or "wrong race".
Now there's this discussion about the CEO selling his home (we are unable to verify is that is indeed his home).
Given his age and the recent layoffs (also stock market performance), it's not unthinkable he'll be replaced. In recent hours we saw many people who said they had left IBM (or got laid off, they're vague about the reasons):
IBM is a company in the loo, a firm in a state of rapid disintegration. In the past 2 years we gave many examples where Fedora/Red Hat staff was forced to adopt slop; in recent days the issue gathered steam or critical traction because there are employees who openly and publicly complain about it. █