Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s financial services company Block has announced it will fire 40 percent of staff – around 4,000 people – because new “intelligence tools” the company is implementing “can do more and do it better.”
The company announced the sackings in the shareholder letter [PDF] accompanying its Q4 earnings announcement on Thursday. The payments and crypto company reported quarterly revenue of about $6.25 billion – up 3.6 percent year-over-year – and gross profit of around $2.9 billion. The company made $1 billion of gross profit in December 2025 alone. Full-year revenue came in at about $24.2 billion, and gross profit was around $10.36 billion.
“2025 was a strong year for us,” Dorsey wrote in the shareholder letter, before posing the question, “Why are we changing how we operate going forward?”
His answer, spread across the letter and a Xeet, is that AI has already changed the way Block works, so it needs to change its structure.
“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. and that’s accelerating rapidly,” he wrote on X.
He decided to let 4,000 people go all at once because “repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead.”
Ah yes, the Thanos Snap Method.
I don’t know what Block is, but if I come across it I’ll be sure to avoid it.
It’s Paypal but with Bitcoin apparently.
But hey, they say they are cutting jobs because of AI. So we have to take them at their word.
Clearly AI and Bitcoin are the future.
That’s only a small part, they own Square.
Do you know if Block and Square share the same group of employees?
I don’t know where to look for legitimate sources on these things… I tried but got two vastly different numbers (5,000 and 12,0000).
Yes, Square is a product that Block sells. Block was actually called “Square” until relatively recently and Jack Dorsey became obsessed with Blockchain.
I do love reminding crypto bros quantum kills bitcoin
They own Square which you’ve almost certainly used if you ever paid a small vendor via a payment card (as opposed to cash).
Oof.
“can do more and do it better.”
And obviously you verified this claim before fetching the axe, right?
They will quietly rehire within 6 months. The wages will be cut and the quality of work will drop. But hey, that’s how we keep this turd flowing, right?
2 things :
- If this is true, why same ai tools cannot replace this hippie ceo guy?
- More often ai sounds like a plausible excuse for cutting operational costs of sinking companies. In case of block, just look at how buttcoin performs Same situation was recently with Gemini, they also suddenly felt ai is ready to replace workers and same ai failed to replace ceo dudes
I’m pretty sure there haven’t been hippie CEOs since Ben and Jerry.
This is what I’ve been saying. Doesn’t matter if AI/LLMs are capable of doing the job. If CEOs think it can, they will do layoffs.
In some cases, it appears to be the opposite: CEOs want to do mass layoffs, so they blame AI rather than taking accountability themselves. The Amazon layoffs reek of this.
Lol, coding ai isnt good enough to fire one person let alone that much. This is just huge expectations on who is left. Its a tool humans have to review. Slop is gonna get them
on a similar note
WiseTech Global to cut 2,000 jobs as AI ends era of ‘manually writing code’
Any job that can be done by an LLM wasn’t a job that needed to get done In the first place.
any manager who tries to replace an actually useful job with an LLM is going to get bit in the ass as productivity slows to a crawl. Other people will hav to step in to clean up the mess and basically do the work that should have been done by the person replaced. Most of the jobs being “replaced by AI” are actually just routine layoffs or companies correcting from over hiring.
I’ve read a story the other day from someone who said they left Amazon due to what a mess it was becoming internally. How increasingly managers were hiring people they didn’t need so their team would be bigger and they would seem more important. This is a well known phenomenon. I suspect a lot of people who did this and created a mess are using the excuse of “embracing AI” to give them selves an off ramp from the mess they created by bloating their departments.
40%, to save others a click.
That might work out for them. AI has to be intensively supervised but it can be a decent force multiplier.
