This was the layoff speech from my supervisor:
"The staff tells me that you are one Hell of an engineer and that if anyone has a difficult problem,
they can bring it to you and you can solve it for them.
There's no place in my organization for such a person."
Intel wonders why they're falling behind.
Or it's a totally fake story
Or, it could be the boss is two faced. Many are thesemdays.
So OP's manager tried to let him down as easily as possible without flat-out saying "You s---! Get out!" and what OP heard was "You're awesome! Your're fired!"
Quite funny on the one hand. One the other hand, it makes you worry about how disconnected OP must be from reality.
Translation: I have no leverage over you.
I cannot play management games effectively over you. I need you to fail, so I can succeed and justify my existence.
He might be saying that just to be nice though. One shouldn't only choose to hear what one wants to hear.