Jack Dorsey's Block Cuts Nearly Half of Its Staff In AI Gamble
- Reference: 0180865286
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/02/26/2250206/jack-dorseys-block-cuts-nearly-half-of-its-staff-in-ai-gamble
- Source link:
> "We're not making this decision because we're in trouble," Dorsey [2]says . "Our business is strong. Gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. But something has changed. 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."
>
> Dorsey opted to do a big layoff instead of gradual cuts because "I'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome." The layoffs were announced on Thursday as part of the company's Q4 2025 earnings. In a [3]shareholder letter (PDF), Dorsey says that "We believe Block will be significantly more valuable as a smaller, faster, intelligence-native company. Everything we do from here is in service of that."
[1] https://www.theverge.com/tech/885710/jack-dorsey-block-layoffs-job-cuts-ai
[2] https://x.com/jack/status/2027129697092731343
[3] https://s29.q4cdn.com/628966176/files/doc_financials/2025/q4/Q4-2025-Shareholder-Letter_Block.pdf
No idea what they do, but... (Score:3)
It'll be the fucked up AI-produced products that screw over customers that get people fired in other companies.
Re: (Score:2)
They do it because their "growth" has stalled.
Their revenue was up by a massive 3% last year in spite of the trend of falling interest rates, which should have helped them.
Their business model as far as I can see is to compete with ApplePay and similar.
Their bet is that by firing 4k and using the cash to hire a few "AI specialists" and buy H200s and expensive RAM they'll build an "AI system" that will save them enough money to that their weak sales growth is compensated with a display of "profits growth", k
"AI works for us but not for our customers!" (Score:5, Interesting)
Another fascinating example of a company where the leadership thinks AI can replace their personnel... but their customers cannot. The lesson they will learn is that AI works either for both or for neither of them, and thus they will be screwed in both cases - either they find out they need personnel they no longer have, or their customers will not need them anymore.
Re: (Score:3)
Yep, have seen this repeatedly, "we are a software company that writes software for other people, we can just codegen it now!"
In the most extreme, when Gemini 3 came out, a sales manager sent an email to his sales team saying that if a customer asks for software that we don't already have, the salesguy can just put the customer prompt into Gemini to get the requested software, then sell it to the customer, without having to know how to write or review code. Of all things he thought Gemini 3 was up to the t
This is marketing (Score:2)
I've seen some people praising this mass layoff as being better and less ghoulish than most others, but that's pure marketing. The severance package being more generous than it had to be is purely a marketing expense, like any other marketing expense. We should be both 1. glad for those affected that they're not being screwed harder than they had to be while also being 2. clear-eyed that Dorsey is doing that to do a bit of reputation laundering. A tactic to try to get people to think of him as being less gh
Re:This is marketing (Score:4, Insightful)
The headline sounds way better than "Incompetent CEO lays off five years of overhiring".
The irony.. (Score:3)
..of removing actual intelligence in order to replace it with "intelligence-native" AI, which is all A and no I.
Apparently Block deals with financial transactions. I see no reason to worry at all. /s
Re: (Score:2)
With casual contact to early 70s researchers, the joke was that the Pentagon funded artificial intelligence research due to a chronic deficiency of the natural product.
Right.... due to "AI" (Score:2)
Nothing to do with the fact most of their revenue comes from bitcoin and crypto transaction fees and that bitcoin price have halved recenty.
Re: Right.... due to "AI" (Score:1)
Ah I see! This could indeed be a management fk-ups . AI probably is the most blamed tech ever.
Dorsey's Rationalle (Score:5, Insightful)
"We're not making this decision because we're in trouble," Dorsey says. "We're doing it because I'm a complete asshole. A greedy asshole."
Untapped potential (Score:2)
Things are going great, we're making more money than ever, and we're enabling new ways to work. Therefore, everybody has to go.
Trust us, AI will create all kinds of new jobs, nobody will be replaced, and we can totally retrain people for new positions! But... not today... LOL.
We will see now (Score:2)
Will he be the "guy that shows off how good it is", or he will crash and burn to the ground faster than commodore minus the engineers?
worse than out sourcing (Score:2)
With outsourcing of knowledge workers, many companies saw the skills and experience leave their company. And instead the subcontractors doing the outsourcing got all the new work and experience.
With the headlong rush into replacing white collar jobs a statistical model. They only ones who benefit are the ones who own the hardware and the training models. And even the later is quite easy to replace.
Whatever you think makes your business valuable, important, and perhaps irreplaceable goes up in smoke the mome
Our business is strong (Score:1)
No, you mean âoeMy businessâ because 4,000 people who thought it was their business too will find out in the coming weeks they were wrong.
There is no âoeourâ and no âoeweâ. Cogs are only part of the machine until they are replaced. Cogs never own the machine, they are only used.
Round 1 job cuts, round 2 product cuts (Score:1)
Every other tech company now is cutting staff in the name of ai. This would soon spread to other industries as well. The unemployment wave would start soon reducing the purchase of the very products these companies have âoeintelligentlyâ built. Then we all sit and cry for the lost economy and the merry days.