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.
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.
I don’t know what Block is, but if I come across it I’ll be sure to avoid it.
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.
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)
