Microsoft offered buyouts to 60,000 staff. Two days later, record profit.

$36.6 billion.

That is how much profit Microsoft made in the three months to the end of September 2026. The figure landed on 28 October, two days after Microsoft told about 60,000 of its own staff it would pay them to leave.

Most news coverage treated the two events as separate stories. Lined up side by side, they raise one plain question. If the company is making this much money, who is the buyout actually for?

How many days passed between the buyout and the profit?

Two. On 26 October 2026, Microsoft offered voluntary exit packages to roughly 60,000 employees, about a quarter of its workforce. The offer went to staff at vice president level or below in the US, Canada, India and the UK, with Xbox, Windows, Copilot and finance named as the divisions most affected. Workers have until early December to decide, and would leave on 31 December if they take it.

Then, on 28 October, Microsoft reported results for the quarter that had already ended a month earlier. Revenue was $92.3 billion, up 19% on the same quarter last year.

Net income, the profit left after every cost, was $36.6 billion. That is 32% higher than a year ago, and it is what the BBC and other outlets reported two days after the buyout offer went out.

How much did Microsoft earn for every worker it just offered to cut?

Divide the profit by the number of people on the buyout list and the answer is about $610,000. That is how much net income Microsoft booked this quarter for every single one of the 60,000 workers it is now paying to leave.

Read next7 companies are winning AI. The other 493 aren't

Spread over the 92 days in the quarter, Microsoft earned nearly $400 million in profit a day. Revenue worked out to close to $1 billion a day, weekends included.

Photo: Brian Smale and Microsoft / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Chief executive Satya Nadella told investors the quarter showed Microsoft "translating our innovation into growing adoption and real-world impact across every industry." Cloud computing, the part of Microsoft that rents out computing power and AI tools to other businesses, grew to $63.9 billion.

Azure, Microsoft's biggest cloud brand, grew even faster, up 48% from a year ago.

Where is the money actually going instead of salaries?

Not into headcount. Microsoft's full-time workforce fell to 223,000 by the end of June 2026, down 5,000 from a year earlier. It was the company's first yearly drop in a decade.

The money is going into buildings full of computer chips. Microsoft spent $39.4 billion on property and equipment in the July to September quarter alone, mostly on the data centres that run its AI tools. That single quarter's building bill came in higher than the profit the company kept over the same three months. Finance chief Amy Hood told investors Microsoft expects to spend more than $50 billion on this in the next quarter alone, pushing the full year toward $170 billion.

38.50$bnQ2 FY26 (Dec 2025)

31.80$bnQ3 FY26 (Mar 2026)

35.80$bnQ4 FY26 (Jun 2026)

36.60$bnQ1 FY27 (Sep 2026)

Q2 FY26 (Dec 2025)	38.50$bn
Q3 FY26 (Mar 2026)	31.80$bn
Q4 FY26 (Jun 2026)	35.80$bn
Q1 FY27 (Sep 2026)	36.60$bn

GAAP net income by quarter. The Dec 2025 figure included a one-off $7.6bn gain from Microsoft's OpenAI investment. Source: Microsoft investor relations quarterly earnings releases.

Is Microsoft the only company doing this?

No. The same pattern, a big profit landing within weeks of a big round of job cuts, has shown up across the technology industry through 2026.

Note: Figures are each company's own reported numbers for the quarter named. Sources: Microsoft and Meta investor relations releases, Oracle investor relations, CNBC, Al Jazeera.

Trending nowLeon Lotz: The farmer the world won't believe

Oracle's cuts, first reported as up to 30,000 roles, ended at 21,000 once the final count came in, about 13% of its staff. Meta's 8,000 cuts followed its $26.8 billion profit by three weeks. Amazon has cut roughly 30,000 corporate jobs since late 2025 while its own operating income kept climbing. Even outside tech, South Africa's power utility posted a record profit this year while selling the least electricity it ever has, so this is not only a Silicon Valley habit.

Photo: Derrick Coetzee from Berkeley, CA, USA / Wikimedia Commons, CC0

Netflix went through its own version of this in October, cutting staff while its own numbers stayed strong. Wall Street is already asking what happens to ordinary retirement accounts if this much AI spending across the industry fails to pay off.

What does Microsoft say the layoffs are actually for?

In its own words, the buyout is about trimming costs and reshaping the workforce for the AI era, and about helping pay for the data centre build-out. Microsoft has not said the buyout is a response to weak results. Its results are strong. The company is choosing to spend its record profit on computing infrastructure rather than on keeping the same number of people on payroll.

That is a legal and ordinary choice for a public company answerable to shareholders, not a sign of trouble. It reads very differently, though, to a worker at vice president level or below in Redmond, Seattle or Hyderabad who is weighing a buyout offer while reading that the company just posted its strongest profit growth in years.

So who ends up paying for the AI boom?

Not Microsoft's shareholders. The stock moved higher after the results came out. Not Microsoft's profit margin either, which grew faster than its revenue did.

For now, the bill is landing on 60,000 people who have until early December to decide whether to take a payout and leave a company that just told investors, in writing, that business has never been better.