When Ryan Breslow returned as CEO of fintech firm Bolt in 2025, he confronted a company whose valuation had plummeted from $11 billion to around $300 million. His diagnosis was direct: a culture of entitlement had taken root, fueled in large part by an HR department that "was creating problems that didn’t exist." At Fortune’s Workforce Innovation Summit, Breslow stated that those problems "disappeared when I let them go," after he eliminated the entire HR function and replaced it with a leaner people operations team focused on training rather than compliance and conflict creation.[1][2]

This move was part of deeper cuts that reduced Bolt to roughly 100 employees who "work a lot harder" with "better energy," eliminating perks like unlimited PTO and four-day workweeks. Breslow fired most of the leadership team as well, insisting 99% of staff couldn’t adapt to the new lean reality. The episode captures more than one startup’s turnaround—it reflects a growing corporate revolt against bureaucratic and ideological overhead that legacy business media has largely downplayed.

The pattern echoes Elon Musk’s 2022 overhaul of Twitter (now X), where roughly 80% of staff, including nearly all HR personnel, were cut. Predictions of collapse proved wrong as user growth accelerated from 360 million MAUs in 2021 to over 550 million by early 2026, despite boycotts and regulatory pressure. Musk removed what he saw as internal saboteurs embedded in administrative layers. Similar logic appears in Breslow’s account: HR, historically tasked with legal compliance on issues like harassment and discrimination, evolved in many firms into an apparatus prioritizing protected classes, grievance cultivation, and risk aversion over productivity.

Data points to HR roles being 75-80% female and disproportionately LGBT—demographics that, when combined with post-2020 DEI mandates, often produced policies disconnected from core business functions. This contributed to an entitlement culture during the easy-money boom years. The correction arrived with 2025’s white-collar layoffs, disproportionately affecting DEI-adjacent and administrative roles, particularly among women and minority women.

Broader forces accelerate this shift. Following the 2024 political realignment, the Trump administration’s Executive Order 14173 targeted federal DEI practices, prompting private-sector rollbacks at firms like Amazon, Google, and Goldman Sachs amid legal risks, shareholder pressure, and ballooning program costs. HR itself faces reinvention: AI tools are automating compliance and administrative work, while executives question whether traditional HR adds value or primarily generates internal drama. Josh Bersin and others document this "great reinvention," with some firms moving to manager-empowered "people ops" models that prioritize speed over process.[3][4]

What others miss is the philosophical dimension. Eliminating HR isn’t mere cost-cutting; it rejects the premise that corporations must function as vehicles for social engineering. By removing layers obsessed with identity over merit, companies like Bolt rediscover startup grit. This heterodox turn—framed by some as anti-bureaucratic realism—aligns with observations that much modern corporate bloat stems from ideological capture rather than genuine necessity. As economic conditions tighten and AI reshapes labor, expect more CEOs to follow Breslow’s lead: problems manufactured by administrators tend to vanish when the administrators do. The quiet revolution against overhead is reshaping American enterprise from within.