After taking his company, Block Inc — formerly Square Inc — to a market cap of over $30 billion, billionaire entrepreneur Jack Dorsey has laid off nearly 40 percent of the fintech giant’s staff.
In a long, rambling post on X-formerly-Twitter — Dorsey’s original baby, infamously — the Block CEO admitted the company’s executives were slashing thousands of jobs in order to embrace AI.
“Today we’re making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we’re reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000,” Dorsey wrote. “That means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation.”
Crucially, Dorsey highlighted that the company is on sound financial ground. Instead, he says the issue is that it just doesn’t need all those people anymore.
“We’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble. our business is strong,” he asserted. “Gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving.” But, Dorsey continued, “something has changed.”
“We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company,” he continued, “and that’s accelerating rapidly.”
The tech billionaire also has a warning for the rest of the country’s workers, saying that any company not doing the same is “late.”
“Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes,” Dorsey wrote.
While tech giants like Amazon and eBay are indeed cutting jobs by the ton, it’s highly unlikely AI is taking them. AI’s 95 percent failure rate at driving revenue notwithstanding — an oft-cited finding from 2025 that often appears more and more prescient as time goes on — there’s compelling evidence that big tech’s layoff spree is driven by the past, not the future.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies around the US added thousands of staffers to their payroll, Block included. (As Cybernews observes, Block’s workforce exploded from 3,900 in 2019 to 12,500 in 2022.) Luckily for it, AI arrived just as companies needed to correct their pandemic hiring sprees — offering executives a convenient excuse for mass layoffs.
Even Dorsey admits “yes we over-hired during [COVID],” which he blames on organizational issues, or, as he puts it, “because i incorrectly built [two] separate company structures (square & cash app) rather than [one].”
“So you over-hired, overbuilt, and now you’re celebrating efficiency while people lost jobs,” one poster replied under Dorsey’s post. “Must be nice to treat human beings like spreadsheet errors.”
All in all, it’s probably cold comfort for the thousands of workers who’ll soon be out of the job. AI might not be replacing them, but it makes a trendy excuse for the likes of Dorsey.
More on AI layoffs: Fear Grows That AI Is Permanently Eliminating Jobs
The post Jack Dorsey Lays Off 4,000 Employees After Move to AI appeared first on Futurism.
