Block, the fintech group headed by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, will cut its workforce by "nearly half" in one of the clearest signs of the sweeping changes AI tools are having on employment.
Shares in the payment company soared more than 25 percent in after-hours trading on Thursday as it announced it would shed 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're already seeing it internally," Dorsey wrote in a letter to shareholders.
"A significantly smaller team, using the tools we're building, can do more and do it better. And intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster every week."
Dorsey, who left his role as CEO of Twitter in 2021, is among the first Silicon Valley chiefs to explicitly tie huge job cuts to the ability of AI to replace human workers.
Amazon has sought to play down the link to AI after announcing lay-offs totaling 30,000 roles since October, months after CEO Andy Jassy warned the technology would mean "fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today" in the coming years, especially in white-collar roles.
Dorsey said he did not think he was early to the realization about the effect that AI could have on work, but that "most companies are late."
He said he expected a "majority of companies" would reach the same conclusion within the next year and make similar structural changes.
The staff reduction at Block comes as anxiety rises about AI leading to job losses across vast parts of the economy.
Investors and economists are grappling with an influx of US economic data and corporate announcements in an effort to gauge the impact the technology could be having on the labor market. The latest non-farm payrolls figures were better than expected, suggesting the domestic jobs market was stabilizing, but several big US companies have committed to cutting staff.
Amazon, UPS, Dow, Nike, Home Depot, and others in late January announced they would be cutting a combined 52,000 jobs.
Dorsey said the cuts at Block, which owns the payment processor Square, came despite what he described as a "strong" financial performance in 2025.
Block has made a contrarian bet on bitcoin at a time when many payment companies favored stablecoins: cash-like digital tokens that became regulated in the US last year.
Block's strategy was spearheaded by Dorsey, a "bitcoin maximalist" who has said he believes the digital currency will eventually eclipse the dollar.
The company offers payment services in bitcoin for merchants and consumers—and suffered a loss on its own bitcoin holdings as the price of the cryptocurrency dropped 23 percent this year.
In contrast, payment companies that made a bet on stablecoins experienced a boost. Stripe earlier this week said its stablecoin transaction volumes increased fourfold last year.
In its fiscal fourth quarter, Block reported revenue of almost $6.3 billion, in line with Wall Street expectations. Its earnings tumbled to 19 cents a share, owing to a $234 million hit on its bitcoin holdings.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01, @06:35AM (3 children)
> in one of the
clearestonly signs of the sweeping changes AI tools are having on employment.FTFY.
Of course, with the only-other incident of this happening that we've seen, the company was forced to re-hire staff (at much reduced pay!) to provide for the failure of Actual Incompetence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01, @06:42AM (1 child)
Which has nothing to do with them now circling the bowl.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 01, @01:49PM
Contrarian to whose position? Bitcoin is, if nothing else, volatile - so whatever side you bet on you've got a chance of big gains, and bigger losses.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01, @07:24PM
Greatly reduced pay all around!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Sunday March 01, @10:21AM (2 children)
This year is going to be very interesting in all the wrong ways, for many reasons, including the crash caused by the bursting of the AI bubble. When you replace humans, some with functioning brains, but machines which spit out random streams of text from a most-plausible-combination-of-words algorithm, you effectively have an entire business running on the ramblings of PHBs, populist politicians and used-car salesmen.
Any fool can see that it won't end well.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 01, @01:45PM (1 child)
I worked for a small struggling wanna-start-up that never really got off the ground, for 12 years. We had potential, we had markets identified and products developed, what we really needed was competent sales and marketing, but the man in charge never wanted to be a "true salesman," so - we sputtered along making the better mousetrap, waiting for the world to find us (it never did.)
At the end of my employment (which was just the beginning of 20 more years of sputtering at a much lower energy level for the company) the company laid off 11 of the last 12 employees, keeping only the accountant for public reporting purposes. Stock had been trading at 0.12 for about a year - when the quarterly report hit showing the layoffs, the market didn't care that headcount had reduced to no future prospects, they reacted to the profit/loss change and the stock jumped to 0.26 - which was nice, because I was holding 80,000 shares so that was like a little $11K severance package from the stock market for me, not complaining, but still endlessly amazed at what investors value and what they don't.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01, @02:20PM
"endlessly amazed at what investors value and what they don't."
"Investors" are all computer models now. There is stimulus, they produce a response
with no "gut feelings" or "common sense".
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Sunday March 01, @05:36PM
The history of Block is weird and interesting
They were a startup-type company 15 years ago and made a nice integrated easy to use point of sale system for small / micro companies because the big players ignored small businesses due to the usual big business inefficiencies, so go all startup innovate disrupt. (This is the "Square" company renamed). Back in those innovation days they had like 1000 employees total.
For no apparent reason they completely stopped innovating about a decade ago but exploded their employment numbers from 1K to 13K. They seem to be just another financial middleman. They got vendor lock in now explode the fees and percentages.
So revenue went from slow growth during the innovation years, to explosive growth during the middleman years, and its stagnated completely for more than half a decade as no one new will sign up seeing what they turned into. Well, hiring continued until recently, but revenue stopped going up.
This is more of a smoke screen to hide a major corporate pivot.
If they fired 12/13th of their workers that would imply they're going back to startup / innovate mode, back in the old days when they made new stuff. Which they haven't since forever.
They fired about half bringing them back to the mid/late middleman era.
My guess is you can replace a lot of the customer service and paper shuffling people at a middleman company with AI. Maybe not well, but you can replace them in some sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block,_Inc.#Allegations_of_illegal_activity [wikipedia.org]
Hindenburg research had/has a short position on Block, those in the know, know what that means. Holy shit. I would not be surprised if revenue drops i half once the legal stuff kicks off for real. Its a strange company, because their whole business model used to be big corporate sucks so little businesses can't have "real" PoS systems, so sign up with us, then they went full on bloodsucker mode and became the big company the customers wanted to avoid. Then the government fraud investigators start to arrive, they're firing practically everyone, etc. Its a company in total chaos so I don't think its a good example or role model for any other company especially WRT "fire everyone use AI". Hypothetically they don't have to worry about AI messing up the books if they're intentionally cooking the books and setting up "AI related hallucinations" to take the fall. This does feed into the negative AI publicity that no one is making money off AI except scammers and middlemen and resellers.
"Oh well you know you can't expect our SEC filings to be accurate we are an all AI company now" "oh well everyone who knew the reports were not being audited internally got replaced with AI so I guess no one is to blame" uh huh well they can still send company officers to prison for fraud if it becomes necessary. As a legal defense strategy I don't think fire everyone and replace with AI is likely to work. But maybe they have no better alternative or have tried everything else.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday March 02, @04:15PM
When I retired, for the first couple of years the government would inform me that I had screwed up my taxes, so I started using H&R Block despite the cost.
After a couple of years, I got another message from the government, and a check: I had spent $40 to have H&R Block overpay them.
I'm back to doing my own taxes now. I hope H&R Block go out of business.
Why do the mainstream media act as if Donald Trump isn't a pathological liar with dozens of felony fraud convictions?