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.
“can do more and do it better.”
And obviously you verified this claim before fetching the axe, right?
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.
And their stock went up 24% as a result…
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.
They own Square which you’ve almost certainly used if you ever paid a small vendor via a payment card (as opposed to cash).
And which departments and skills are they cutting the most?
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.
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
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)
No, it’s really not. Thus the 6000 remaining employees.
(Assuming this is a significant part of their business)
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.
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 :-)
Removed by mod
Finally, AI hate in it’s purest, most logical form.
Is it? You like him?
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.
