Megan Skiendel: Hey. You look like you have a take.
David Sterling: I have three. But start with this one: Abrahami just told the world — and his employees, simultaneously, on X — that Wix is cutting a thousand people because of AI. And I don't believe him.
Megan Skiendel: The X thing alone — that's a choice.
David Sterling: It is. But set that aside for a second — actually, no, it matters, we'll come back. The structural point is this: imagine your salary is paid in euros but your employer prices your output in yen. Yen weakens. Your boss doesn't suddenly announce the company is going 'yen-native.' They just pay fewer people. That is Wix. Sixty-plus percent of headcount in Israel, revenue denominated in dollars, shekel strengthens — you have a P&L problem that has nothing to do with Claude Design or Anthropic or any of the AI framing Abrahami reached for.
Megan Skiendel: The 1970s programming languages line, though. That's — I mean, that sentence is doing serious narrative work.
David Sterling: It's doing all of it. That's the point. In May 2026, nearly six thousand Israeli tech workers lost jobs — shekel-driven, across the sector. Wix is the one that had a quotable CEO.
Megan Skiendel: Okay but hold on — the currency read explains the cut. It doesn't explain the arithmetic. Revenue guidance down twenty-five million, bookings down fifty million, and they raised free cash flow guidance by twenty million to around four-twenty. That's not a shekel story. That's margin engineering.
David Sterling: The cut *is* the margin engineering.
Megan Skiendel: Right, but — wait, actually that's not quite what I'm getting at. Because Claude Design shipped. April 2026. Anthropic put a real product into Wix's core SMB market before the layoffs were even announced. That changes what the cut means. It's not just currency arbitrage at that point.
David Sterling: Claude Design is still in beta. That's a genuine threat, I'm not dismissing it — but it hasn't taken a single dollar of revenue yet. The fifty-million bookings miss did.
Megan Skiendel: And the stock is at January 2017 levels. The market isn't buying the AI pivot OR the cost discipline story. But then you look at what Wix actually announced — Microsoft 365 Copilot integration, Stripe Projects, new AI-focused roles inside the restructuring itself — that's not press release material. Those are operational moves.
David Sterling: So your read is the AI threat is real, the currency problem is real, and the FCF raise tells you the cut was the only lever they had left.
David Sterling: That's my read too. But the buyback is where it breaks open for me. April 2026. Modified Dutch auction. More than one-point-six billion dollars returned to shareholders. Weeks — not quarters, weeks — before Abrahami posts the memo on X.
Megan Skiendel: The sequencing is uncomfortable.
David Sterling: It's a tell. You do not have a four-week strategic revelation. You don't wake up May 28th and suddenly realize you're not AI-native. That decision sequence — return one-point-six billion, then cut a thousand people — that's the CFO's fingerprints, not a product pivot.
Megan Skiendel: Honestly, I want to push back slightly — companies do both simultaneously as a confidence signal. 'We're returning capital AND restructuring, we're not desperate.' But then Wix's stock is still down forty-seven percent year-to-date. So either the Jefferies conference crowd doesn't believe the transformation story, or the buyback itself is the tell you're naming — that someone in that building knew the revenue guidance was about to come down twenty-five million before that auction closed.
David Sterling: That's exactly the question. Did the CFO know.
Megan Skiendel: And if yes — that's not a layoff story. That's a capital allocation story with Squarespace and Shopify waiting at the edges while Wix burns the cash cushion.
David Sterling: The AI framing is real, I'll grant Abrahami that much. But the buyback timing is the load-bearing fact. That's where the hot take actually holds.
Megan Skiendel: And that's the part no one has actually priced. Because the buyback, the shekel, the FCF raise — those are all arguments about what already happened. Claude Design's adoption rate among SMBs is what happens next. And honestly, if Anthropic accelerates that — moves faster than Wix can execute whatever this AI-native pivot actually is — then the debate we've been having about whether the shekel or the strategy drove the cut becomes kind of... irrelevant. The restructuring math just doesn't hold.
David Sterling: Fine. I'll half-concede the AI threat is real. But the $420 million FCF target and the January 2017 stock price are telling two different stories simultaneously. One of them is wrong.
Megan Skiendel: And Anthropic doesn't care which one.
