On Wednesday morning Microsoft announced it was laying off 10,000 employees, about 5 % of its complete headcount, in response to lowered income and a “re-aligned core structure.” Hours earlier, dozens of Microsoft executives attended an unique, company-funded Sting live performance outdoors of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The mixture of the 2 occasions is a surprisingly tone-deaf search for the world’s largest software program maker.

The Wall Street Journal broke the information of the Tuesday night time live performance, which was reportedly an “intimate” gathering of fifty or so individuals. Gordon “Sting” Matthew Thomas Summer is among the most recognizable rock musicians on the planet, whose private appearances generally cost around $500,000 based on AAE Music. It’s not identified if Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who personally signed the weblog put up asserting the mass layoff, attended the live performance, although he was current in Switzerland for the World Economic Forum.

Nadella didn’t announce any cutbacks for govt pay or bonuses.

Ultimately a boujie, star-studded govt occasion that value the equal of 5 to 10 years of a daily Microsoft worker’s wage in all probability wouldn’t make a dent within the 200-billion-dollar firm’s plan to chop its workforce. And Microsoft is hardly the one tech firm to take action in the previous couple of weeks — Google introduced a similar cull of 12,000 workers simply this morning. But it’s not possible to overstate how unhealthy the optics are for Microsoft and its CEO, who claimed that the corporate was eliminating jobs “in the most thoughtful and transparent way possible.”