After taking his company, Block Inc. — formerly Square Inc. — to a market cap of more than $30 billion, billionaire entrepreneur Jack Dorsey has laid off about 40 percent of the fintech giant’s workforce.
Ex-Dorsey in a long, combative post on Twitter original childNotorious – The Block CEO admitted that company executives were cutting thousands of jobs in order to embrace AI.
“Today we are making one of the most difficult decisions in our company’s history: We are reducing our organization by nearly half, from more than 10,000 people to less than 6,000,” Dorsey wrote. “This means more than 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or enter into counselling.”
Importantly, Dorsey highlighted that the company is in strong financial condition. Instead, he says the issue is that it no longer needs all those people.
“We are not making this decision because we are in trouble. Our business is strong,” he said. “Gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more customers, and profitability is improving.” But, Dorsey added, “something has changed.”
“We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re building and using, combined with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working that fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company,” he adds, “and it’s growing exponentially.”
The tech billionaire also has a warning for the rest of the country’s workforce, saying any company that isn’t doing the same is “late.”
“Within the next year, I believe most companies will reach similar conclusions and make similar structural changes,” Dorsey wrote.
While tech giants like Amazon and EBAY In fact jobs are being cut drastically, it is highly unlikely that AI will take them over. Despite AI’s 95 percent failure rate in increasing revenue — an oft-cited finding of 2025 that often seems more and more prescient as time goes on — there is strong evidence that big tech’s layoff spree is driven by the past, not the future.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies across the US added thousands of employees to their payrolls, including Block. (As cybernews believe inThe bloc’s workforce is set to grow from 3,900 in 2019 to 12,500 in 2022.) Fortunately, the arrival of AI comes just when companies need to recover from their pandemic-related hiring spree – executives offer convenient excuse For mass layoffs.
even Dorsey admits “Yes, we over-hired during (COVID),” which he attributes to organizational issues, or, as he puts it, “because I created (two) separate company structures (Square and Cash App) the wrong way instead of (one).”
“So you hired more than you needed, built more than you needed, and now you’re celebrating efficiency while people lost their jobs,” A poster replied Under Dorsey’s post. “It would be nice to treat humans like spreadsheet errors.”
Overall, this is probably a relief for thousands of workers who will soon be out of a job. AI may not replace them, but it has become a modern excuse for the likes of Dorsey.
More on AI layoffs: Fears are growing that AI is permanently eliminating jobs
