Aaron ‘Homeboy’ Tilley Among Those Laid Off From the WSJ’s Tech Staff Last Week

Last week The Wall Street Journal laid off about a dozen tech reporters and editors — not on the fun side, where folks like Joanna Stern and Nicole Nguyen work, but on the straight news side. Chris Roush at Talking Biz News obtained a memo sent to the staff from WSJ editor-in-chief Emma Tucker, which concluded:

We’re also creating a new Tech & Media enterprise team, reporting to Sarah, and we’re creating two new jobs on this team based in San Francisco. In the coming weeks, we’ll be reconfiguring beats on the tech team to give more of them a wide ambit. Fewer will focus narrowly on individual companies. We are also advertising for a new tech-focused job on Heard in New York.

These changes do mean that some reporters and editors in San Francisco and New York will be leaving us. I want to thank them for their contributions to the Journal. I want to especially thank Jason Dean, who is departing, for his long and distinguished service.

It was the reporters who focused on specific companies who got laid off, including the Journal’s beat reporter for Apple for the last 6 years, Aaron Tilley. Tilley was last in the news himself a month ago, when one of his former sources, a now-former Apple engineer named Andrew Aude, settled a lawsuit filed by Apple (and who addressed Tilley in text messages as “Homeboy”) and issued the following public apology:

I spent nearly eight years as a software engineer at Apple. During that time, I was given access to sensitive internal Apple information, including what were then unreleased products and features. But instead of keeping this information secret, I made the mistake of sharing this information with journalists who covered the company. I did not realize it at the time, but this turned out to be a profound and expensive mistake. Hundreds of professional relationships I had spent years building were ruined. And my otherwise successful career as a software engineer was derailed, and it will likely be very difficult to rebuild it. Leaking was not worth it. I sincerely apologize to my former colleagues who not only worked tirelessly on projects for Apple, but work hard to keep them secret. They deserved better.

I have no idea whether this fiasco had anything to do with Tilley being laid off (perhaps not, given Tucker’s decision to have fewer reporters on staff who “focus narrowly on individual companies”) but it couldn’t have helped. It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement to have someone publicly declaring that they deeply regret ever having been a source for a Wall Street Journal reporter, and that doing so not only cost them their job but ruined their entire career.

It also probably didn’t help Tilley’s case that he wasn’t very good at covering Apple.

★ Tuesday, 11 March 2025