The mood in Silicon Valley, literally and metaphorically one of the sunniest places on earth, has darkened.
It’s not just about wrenching layoffs, nauseating stock-price declines, and invasive regulatory probes. True, Elon Musk’s decimation of the Twitter workforce (down more than 60 percent) was a gut punch. And the hacking at Salesforce, Amazon, and Meta and pruning at DoorDash, Stripe, Lyft, and Netflix contributed to the gloom. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index’s 33 percent decline in 2022, the evaporation of $855 billion in Tesla’s valuation, and the E.U.’s latest $400 million fine of Meta over its ad practices all were genuine buzzkills.
