Jack Dorsey Cuts Blocks in Half, Says AI Made 4,000 Employees Redundant
Blocks, Jack Dorsey's payments company, is laying off nearly half its workforce — not because of financial distress, but because Dorsey says AI tools have made smaller teams more productive than large ones. It's the most explicit case yet of a major tech CEO framing mass layoffs as an AI-driven structural choice.
Jack Dorsey announced Thursday that Blocks, the parent company of Square and Cash App, is cutting roughly 4,000 employees — nearly half its workforce — in what he described as an AI-driven reorganization rather than a financial retreat. In a memo posted publicly, Dorsey wrote that "intelligence tools we're creating" are "enabling a new way of working," one that favors flatter, leaner teams over the headcount-heavy org charts that defined the last decade of tech scaling, as @jack detailed.
The framing is striking. Previous waves of tech layoffs — at Meta, Google, Amazon — were attributed to over-hiring during the pandemic or macroeconomic headwinds. Dorsey is making a different argument entirely: that the work itself has changed. AI tools, he claims, now allow a smaller number of employees to accomplish what previously required multiples. The layoffs are not a correction; they're a redesign.
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