“Wall Street” refers to stock investors and analysts who put pressure on the company to increase their profit and share prices above all else. They are motivated primarily by making a profit on their investment rather than long term health of the company.
This is due to the New York Stock Exchange being located on Wall Street in New York.
> The announcement of the layoffs was theatre for Wall Street.
I'm interpreting this as "the (publicly-traded) company used a layoff announcement to appease investors and show them that executive management is taking steps to ensure the company operates more efficiently, thereby keeping it within the good graces of these investors/hedge-fund managers/etc".
They laid people off only on paper, essentially moving those people to outsource roles. This made their ongoing expenses look better to investors, when presented in a dishonest manner.
I interpreted that as "for investors". Basically reassuring them that the org is not bloated, or improving the raw numbers so anyone using heuristics based on those numbers is made happy.
If a company is experiencing a dipping stock price (poor growth or whatever other reason) they can announce a huge layoff to attempt to bolster the stock price
