CHARLOTTE — Wells Fargo announced Monday morning that it will be laying off the entire company, effective immediately, in what executives are calling “a natural continuation of our long-term strategic plan to fire everyone in increasingly smaller batches.”
Despite the total workforce elimination, Wells Fargo emphasized that the move is not due to financial struggles. The bank’s stock price is hovering near a five-year high. Internal documents describe the decision as “a proactive, efficiency-driven, AI-recession-aligned headcount normalization initiative designed to ensure continued shareholder serenity.”
“In other words, fuck you,” said Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf.
For the past two years, the bank has laid off employees in increments of 20–40 people at a time—a cadence widely interpreted as an attempt to avoid triggering federal WARN Act requirements. Executives now say they are “tired of the administrative gymnastics” involved in laying people off slowly enough to stay under legal thresholds.
“We just don’t give a shit anymore,” Scharf said in a statement released Monday. “We tried the whole ‘thirty here, forty there’ approach. It was exhausting. Every time we got close to a WARN trigger, someone in legal would start hyperventilating. At this point, it’s faster to fire everyone at once and sort out the paperwork later. We’re just… done.”
He added: “Honestly? We hate all of you equally. This isn’t personal. It’s just quarterly.”
Wells Fargo currently employs approximately 27,000 people in Charlotte, making it one of the city’s largest private employers and, according to several local economists, “the final Jenga block holding the regional economy upright through sheer inertia.”
All 27,000 will be laid off by noon.
The bank says another 27,000 “fresh, untraumatized workers” will be hired after the holidays under a new model described internally as “reimagined right-shored talent clusters,” also known as the same jobs with different names.
The Uptown signage will remain.
