Startup employee fired after building automated system to streamline tasks

It's 2026 and people didn't learn yet that your manager is not your friend.

So here it is: your manager's job is to extract value from you. You are just a replaceable part that they will use until you have no value.

Your job is not to do your job but provide value for them. In order to keep your paycheck, the provided value needs to depend on you in a way that if you are replaced they will lose the value.

Smarter person won't tell anyone and take several full time jobs like that and "do" them all remotely.