Bill Ready, CEO of Pinterest, speaks at the 28th annual Milken Institute Global Conference at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California, on May 5, 2025.
Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images
Pinterest CEO Bill Ready rebuked staffers who created an internal tool to track layoffs at the company, and fired those involved.
“Healthy debate and dissent are expected, that’s how we make our decisions,” Ready said at a companywide meeting last week, according to audio obtained by CNBC. “But there’s a clear line between constructive debate and behavior that’s obstructionist.”
Pinterest announced on Jan. 27 that it would lay off less than 15% of its workforce and cut back on office space as part of a broader restructuring aimed at directing resources toward artificial intelligence projects. The company said it expects the layoffs will be complete by the end of September.
Following the announcement, Pinterest’s technology chief addressed the layoffs in a meeting. Some employees asked which teams were impacted and whether more job cuts were coming, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the meeting was private.
Several Pinterest engineers then created an internal software tool to try and quantify the layoffs. Pinterest fired the engineers on Friday, the person said. It’s unclear how many employees were let go.
Ready defended the moves at an all-hands meeting on Friday, saying Pinterest was facing a “critical moment” in the industry. Employees should consider a job elsewhere if they’re “working against the direction of the company” and disagree with its mission, he said.
Ready said Pinterest wouldn’t disclose detailed information about the layoffs out of a concern for staffers’ privacy.
“I know people have natural curiosity around these things,” Ready said. “We shared some of those major structural changes. The smaller ones, those will be communicated at the team level.”
A Pinterest spokesperson confirmed the engineer incident and town hall meeting, but declined to comment on the firings.
“After being clearly informed that Pinterest would not broadly share information identifying impacted employees, two engineers wrote custom scripts improperly accessing confidential company information to identify the locations and names of all dismissed employees and then shared it more broadly,” the spokesperson said. “This was a clear violation of Pinterest policy and of their former colleagues’ privacy.”
Pinterest has been investing heavily in AI to surface more personalized and relevant content, and to keep users returning to its platform. It’s also rolled out automated tools for marketers in an effort to better compete with digital ad leaders Meta and Google.
Investors have raised concerns around whether the increasing popularity of consumer chatbots from OpenAI, Google and others could steal users and ad dollars away from Pinterest. There’s particular consternation around the use of AI agents for shopping, “which compresses the market of discovery and purchase on competing platforms,” Wedbush analysts wrote in a research note last week.
Pinterest shares are down 20% so far this year after dropping 11% in 2025.
“We can’t tolerate from each other obstructionism, especially when we have a mission that is so meaningful but also where the odds are stacked against us,” Ready said. “We think we can beat those odds, but as a small purpose driven player competing against the largest companies in the history of the world, the only way that we succeed is if we work together, constructively, with clarity and focus.”
More recently, Pinterest’s advertising sales slowed as some large U.S. retailers weathered the impact of President Donald Trump’s tariff policies.
Tech companies have continued to downsize this year as they look for more ways to increase efficiencies and invest in AI. Amazon last week said it would lay off about 16,000 corporate employees, after it let go 14,000 staffers in October. Meta cut about 10% of staff in its Reality Labs unit, while design software maker Autodesk slashed about 7% of its workforce.
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