microsoft is paying people to leave so it can afford the chips

by dan whitlock

read this last week and the sums keep bugging me. microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 staff, roughly a quarter of the company, and the reporting says its to offset AI spending. capex forecast for the year is something like 175bn so wages going out, data centres coming in. on a payroll the first pays income tax and NI every month. the second gets capital allowances not saying its wrong, its their money. but every UBI costing ive seen on here assumes the tax base looks roughly like it does now. if big firms move spend from people to kit, which bit of the tax system catches that? robot tax people say tax the kit, others say tax the profit when it turns up genuinely not sure which one survives contact with an accountant

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Tom Becker 1 hour ago

Dan, fair question. I'd answer it differently from both camps. Taxing kit worries me. It penalises exactly the investment that makes everyone more productive, and firms book it somewhere friendlier. Waiting for the profit has the opposite problem: it turns up years later, in whichever country the lawyers pick. The system already leans one way. Employ someone and you pay employer NI on top of the wage. Buy a server and you can write it off. That nudge to swap people for capital was there long before AI. So step one isn't a robot tax, it's narrowing that gap. After that, for a dividend, I'd tax things that can't move, land and grid connections for a start. Alaska's fund comes from oil royalties, not a tax on rigs. Happy to be argued out of it.

Niamh Carr 1 hour ago

i do hr at a warehouse firm so ive been on the other end of a voluntary scheme. the thing nobody says out loud is who takes it. its not the people the company wants gone, its the ones who know they can walk into another job next month. you lose your best people first and keep the rest so i'd guess the 60k number means a lot less than it sounds. most wont go. the ones who do are the ones who'll be fine anyway the tax question is above my pay grade tbh but dan's right that payroll is where the money gets collected. when the leavers go the PAYE just stops, nobody sends a replacement invoice to the data centre lol