What Silicon Valley’s boom-and-bust history tells us about its latest slowdown

The bad news just keeps coming. It started with hiring freezes, then moved to layoffs. A lot of them. Twitter, Lyft, Stripe, Salesforce and, of course, Meta are cutting thousands of jobs. It’s a turn of events that felt almost inconceivable a year ago, after a two-decade run during which the industry seemed unstoppable. But tech is notorious for booms and busts — and not just the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Margaret O’Mara, a professor of history at the University of Washington who studies the links between technology and politics, about key similarities and differences between the tech sector’s current downturn and those of the past.