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The Block, the fintech group headed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, will cut its workforce by “approximately half,” in one of the clearest signs of the broader implications of AI tools on employment.
Shares of the payments company rose more than 25 percent in afternoon trade on Thursday as it announced it would eliminate more than 4,000 jobs from its 10,000-strong workforce.
“Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company. We are already seeing this internally,” Dorsey wrote in a letter to shareholders.
“A significantly smaller team can do more work and do it better using the tools we’re building. And intelligence tool capabilities are growing exponentially every week.”
Dorsey, who left his role as Twitter CEO in 2021, is among the first Silicon Valley chiefs to explicitly make massive job cuts to AI’s ability to replace human workers.
Amazon has sought to downplay links to AI by announcing a total of 30,000 job cuts since October, months after CEO Andy Jassy warned that the technology would mean “some of the jobs that are being done today will be done by fewer people” in years to come, especially in white-collar roles.
Dorsey said he didn’t think he would have realized the impact AI would have on work early on, but “most companies are late”.
He said he expected “most companies” to come to the same conclusion within the next year and make similar structural changes.
The bloc’s workforce cuts come as concerns grow about AI leading to job losses in large parts of the economy.
Investors and economists are grappling with an influx of US economic data and corporate announcements in an effort to assess the impact AI will have on the labor market. The latest non-farm payrolls data was better than expected, suggesting the domestic jobs market is stabilizing, but several large US companies have committed to cutting staff.
Amazon, UPS, Dow, Nike, Home Depot and others announced in late January that they would cut a combined 52,000 jobs.
Dorsey said the cuts at Block, which owns payments processor Square, come despite “strong” financial performance in 2025.
The block makes a contra bet on Bitcoin at a time when many payments companies favor stablecoins: cash-like digital tokens that became regulated in the US last year.
The block’s strategy was led by “Bitcoin maximalist” Dorsey, who has said he believes the digital currency will eventually eclipse the dollar.
The company provides payment services in bitcoin for merchants and consumers – and has suffered a loss on its own bitcoin holdings due to the cryptocurrency’s 23 percent drop in price this year.
In contrast, payments companies betting on stablecoins got a boost. Stripe said earlier this week that its stablecoin transaction volume has quadrupled in the last year.
In its fiscal fourth quarter, the block reported revenue of about $6.3 billion, in line with Wall Street expectations. Its earnings fell to 19 cents per share due to a $234 million hit on its Bitcoin holdings.
