"Elon has signaled to the industry that you can layoff a 80% of your employees and things will still be OK, and the rest of the industry is following his lead."

When I pointed out that that wasn't true, things were actually getting rather bad amongst the employees and from a product quality / safety perspective, the response was, "It doesn't matter. They've all decided the status quo must change and decided that they want to do the same things."

This rhymes with what I heard from other senior people as well. And suspiciously the same anti-employee tactics have been happening across the industry at the same time -- layoffs, forced attrition, shifting jobs offshore, RTO, increased workloads with reducing headcount leading to record levels of burnout...

Even if we charitably assume it's group-think, that's still a form of collusion.