The entire thing is a non-statement (I dunno about the GP's accusation of lying; you can't lie if you don't say anything), so it should be one small paragraph. Or, two, if you want to say you are sorry for both employees and customers.
Nobody gains anything by the chatGPT-like decompresion of the message.
There was a time when corporations had principles ahead of maximizing stock holder value. Maybe we should re-examine that.
First, I want all companies, regardless of who invests in them, to hold some level of social responsibility to the society around them. Sometimes layoffs are necessary, and companies can't maintain excess costs forever, but there's some value to society to maintain employment.
Second, investments that return a profit to their investors is great, and as an investor, it's something I would want. That said, it's unreasonable to expect exponential growth forever, AND it compromises their ability to focus on other principles. How much return on investment is enough before a company can focus on being a force of good? 10%, 100% 1000%, 1M%?
Third, as an investor, I question if paying execs so much more than rank-and-file employees is good. So thats another example principle. I assume a well paid exec is incentivized to increase short term value, while as an investor I value long-term growth. Having a healthy employee base full of bright talented workers (incentivized by top-tier salary) seems a better solution.
there's nothing that makes the HN comment section happy about these corporate communications. if some CEO literally fell on his sword in personal apology to these folks, they'd gripe about the blood stain.
When the Groupon CEO resigned, he basically did something like that and it was actually pretty well received by this community: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24453681