Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter and head of Block.xyz (owner of payment platforms like Square), has announced that he is firing 40 percent of his employees because of productivity gains in artificial intelligence and that this is the right decision because getting lean now is better than going through the demoralization of successive cuts.
we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company.
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today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are…
— jack (@jack) February 26, 2026
Block stocks shot up 20 percent on the news.
There’s lots of chatter online about how every CEO is thinking of this right now. I’m sure they are.
But remember, when Dorsey turned over Twitter to Elon Musk, Elon was able to lose about 80 percent of the staff. Block went on a Covid-era hiring spree, taking the company from just over 3,000 employees in 2019 to over 12,000 by 2022.
This looks more to me like AI washing the announcement of an already necessary downsizing.