I work at a company that did similarly large layoffs despite record profits. In our case, the cuts were conducted by an MBA.

Many important revenue driving products have been mangled by having their teams entirely removed, with pages going completely unanswered.

In at least one case, it seems like an entire team was cut in error.

The company was seriously negatively impacted, but the share price hasn't budged. To the extent that share price is connected to reality, I imagine it will take while for the market to notice the impacts of a layoff

What the CEO is saying is that he hired a load of people into the company that they don't need. Now they're going to try and get rid of them. Wouldn't the company have not been better off just... not hiring the useless people in the first place? And isn't it going to be a significant drain on resources and morale to pick through and get rid of all the dead weight? And are they actually going to get rid of the bad people, or as with most of these situations are they going to be left with the politicians whilst the good people go off to great opportunities elsewhere?

Businesses are path dependent, you can't just go "oh, not enough people hire more, oops! too many, fire some!".