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.
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?
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.
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.
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’
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.
They always claim it’s AI. In my experience they want to sell, and their operations budget just got halved so they look extremely profitable.
Because fuck those people’s livelihood, there’s money to be made!
Also why you should never trust private equity. Because they’ll buy this company, come in, realize what just happened, and their solution will be to… cut more people and pawn the company off on yet another firm.
Lots of companies are doing this. They invested in LLM tech. Most on the ground realized it doesn’t work except in very, very specific circumstances. Upper management either decides they’re lying to protect their jobs, or doesn’t care and just wants an excuse to reduce “human resource” costs and lays off the people they expected the AI to replace anyway. Short term profits rise while remaining employees are stuck doing double or more work to take up the slack, but with so many companies doing it, they can’t leave. Eventually, the bubble will burst anf companies will fail. Retirement funds will take tons of loss to prop up all of the “too big to fail” companies while their smaller competitors die off. Some new bubble will come along and repeat the process. Meanwhile consolidation makes products worse and increases inflation, fraud runs rampant, and crime spikes as more and more people can’t afford to live. End stage capitalism as predicted many times over the last few centuries. All we can do is try to survive at this point and keep showing the right wing masses the truth until they either stop following hate driven distractions to their own detriment or the whole system collapses.
I’m relatively certain most of the masses you describe are still unaware they’re being used.
They hear words they like, which come along with actions they can’t even put in their reality, so they must be fiction. I’ve been in an abusive relationship. It’s rather like classic Star Trek: No matter how traumatic an experience was, you wake up in the morning, and it’s all been reset. You pretend it didn’t happen, because if you start seeing a pattern, you suddenly see the problem, which is a very human response.
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.
I do love reminding crypto bros quantum kills bitcoin
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).
Block is the parent company for square, cash app, tidal, afterpay. In the same way that meta runs Facebook and Instagram.
Well fuck, TIL Tidal is owned by Jack. Since my mantra, since birth some 60 odd years ago, is “FUCK Jack Dorsey” (which, as mantras go, was kinda dumb because it was absolutely meaningless until like 20 years ago), looks like I’m moving back to Qobuz.
Yes, Square is a product that Block sells. Block was actually called “Square” until relatively recently and Jack Dorsey became obsessed with Blockchain.
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?
WTF are they doing that still needs 6000 people?
Financial services, so probably transcribing people’s shitty scribbled expense reports into actually usable structured data, and doing it flawlessly enough they don’t get sued.
Edit: Apparently this is the parent company of Square. That’s not something that should really need a huge staff to maintain.
Can we start placing bets on when we find out that the “AI tools” they’re using are just sweat shop workers in Bangladesh processing invoices?
Eh, I know this is the anti-AI instance, but reading and interpreting things like that is something you can verifiably get AI to do 90% of the time.
Until you realize those 10% errors missed the decimal point.
Again, that’s what the 6000 remaining employees would be for.
Because 90% accuracy is acceptable for financial institutions …
I’ve got an idea. If 90% of AI’s output is accurate, just have humans review the 10% that will be inaccurate.
(Yes I am an AI expert, how did you know)
Which outputs are accurate, and which ones are inaccurate? How could you tell? What steps did you take to verify accuracy? Was verifying it a manual process?
That’s easy. You just get a second AI to ask the first AI if their responses were accurate or not
(/s)
No, it’s really not. Thus the 6000 remaining employees.
(Assuming this is a significant part of their business)
Hell USPS has been using machine learning (yes a kind of AI but not the kind they are implying) for years to do that kind of thing.
Kind of
They’ve had several address resolution centers around the country, where reviewers look at mail and figure out it’s address. They don’t physically handle the mail, it’s an image on a screen.
Iirc they’ve been doing it this way since the 70s
No? For everything they can they just use OCR and then send it on its way without a human having ever seen it sometimes. If the hand writing is bad enough that the machine can’t figure it out that’s where the human reviewers come in.
They own Square which is a card processing service typically used by small vendors. If you’ve ever gone to a festival or concert merch table or farmers market and they accepted credit card, it was probably Square.
Ah, never mind. Weird they don’t just call themselves Square.
They were called that for most of their history until Jack Dorsey wanted to change the name to hype some crypto.
That wasn’t the reason. It’s mostly because cash app became so big that it got confusing if square was the company or the product. Same way Facebook became meta once the had Instagram.
I’m pretty sure “Block” is derived from “Blockchain”
Lol!
Okay, that’s way too right now. Of course he did.
All this talk is too meta for me.
…Like the company Meta, after they named themselves after the Metaverse.
That worked out swimmingly for them.
Right. So, generating training data :-)
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.
Yep. This fuckhat is a LinkedIn bro larping as a “normal dude”. All CEOs are scum
And their stock went up 24% as a result…
And which departments and skills are they cutting the most?
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.
Removed by mod
Finally, AI hate in it’s purest, most logical form.
Is it? You like him?
