Dorsey’s Block Fires Nearly Half Of The Company In ‘Massive’ AI Bet, Sending Shares Soaring

One week after WIRED reported that things were pretty dismal over at Jack Dorsey’s payment processing company Block (formerly Square), the company announced that they are cutting 4,000 employees - nearly half of their headcount – in order to invest ‘heavily’ in artificial intelligence tools to run more efficiently, including its own called Goose, Bloomberg reports. 

The news sent shares up over 30% in after hours trade.

“We are taking bold and decisive action here, but we’re doing it from a position of strength,” CFO Amrita Ahuja told Bloomberg, adding “We’re doing it in a way that we believe positions us to move even faster for our customers.”

The reduction in force, which was announced in a shareholder letter on Thursday, comes after rolling job eliminations that have often been tied to annual performance reviews. 

…

In the shareholder letter, the company highlighted strong financial performance over 2025 including that gross profit growth more than doubled from the first quarter to the fourth quarter. Dorsey, the company’s co-founder, touted how the company has reignited growth of users of its peer-to-peer payments app Cash App, scaled its lending products and accelerated Square gross payment volume. Block reported gross profit of $10.36 billion in 2025, up 17% year-over-year. -Bloomberg

“Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company,” wrote Dorsey, adding that “we’re already seeing it internally. A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better.”

As noted, according to a report last week in WIRED, things are bad over at Block…

“Morale is probably the worst I’ve felt in four years,” reads one employee complaint submitted to Dorsey in a recent all-hands meeting (AI workers will notably not be submitting complaints anytime soon). “The overarching culture at Block is crumbling.“

“We don’t yet know if our livelihoods will be affected, and this makes it incredibly hard to make major life choices without knowing if we still have a job next week,” another employee said in a complaint. 

Is this the first domino in the AI-driven layoff dystopia that we have been feamongered about, bringing fictional predictions into factual problems, as companies look upon Block’s big gains and stroke their Dorsey-like beards at just how many of the proletariate can be replaced by an agent or two?