Hi, companies over-hired. A problem at big companies is that staff create the need for more staff. You end up with lots of weird situations like departments creating work for each other that doesn't benefit the customer.

Also more mature businesses are different from startups. A mature business would not know what to do with "100 random little ai-powered mission-aligned startups under your control.", in fact that typically reads to management as chaos.

That just means the core could have been maintained by less staff beforehand.

More money gained in lobbying vs making a good product?