IBM would have eliminated 100,000 employees to give them a look "cool" and "trend"

IBM CEO, Virginia "Ginni" Rometty.Brendan McDermid / Reuters

• IBM has reportedly fired as many as 100,000 employees in recent years because it wanted to appear "cool" and "fashionable" like Amazon or Google, Bloomberg announced Wednesday.
• IBM has been the victim of several age-based discrimination lawsuits initiated by former employees.
• When asked about this charge, the company said IBM had been "reinvented to target higher value-added opportunities for our customers."
• Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.

Hoping to meet millennia as "cool" and "fashionable" as Amazon or Google, IBM has perhaps destroyed up to 100,000 employees in recent years.

The charge was laid following the filing by a former vice president of IBM of a lawsuit for discrimination on the basis of age, according to a Bloomberg report.

When asked to comment on the report, IBM told Business Insider: "We have reinvented IBM over the past five years to target higher value-added opportunities for our customers."

IBM was hit by several lawsuits accusing technology giants of discriminating against older workers.

In a civil case, Alan Wild, former vice president of human resources at IBM, said the company "had laid off 50,000 to 100,000 employees in recent years," according to Bloomberg, citing a court document filed Tuesday at Texas.

In his testimony, Mr. Wild said that IBM wanted to show millennia that the company was not "an old fuddy duddy organization" and that she hoped to appear as " [a] cool and trendy organization "like the Google search giant or the online retail giant Amazon.

"To do this, IBM has undertaken to lay off a large portion of its aging workforce over the years," Wild said, according to the report.

In his email, IBM said "hiring 50,000 employees each year and spending nearly half a billion dollars on training our team."

"We also receive more than 8,000 applications every day – the highest ever, so IBM's strategy and direction is proving enthusiastic," the company said.

IBM is a major player in the enterprise technology market. But the company has battled new rivals, led by Amazon and Google, that dominate the growing market for cloud computing – and its revenues have steadily declined over the past seven years.

IBM employed 350,600 people globally at the end of 2018, down 19% from 2013.

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