Jack Dorsey Cuts 4,000 Jobs at Block in Bold AI Pivot

Block Inc shocked Wall Street Thursday by announcing it will fire roughly 40% of its workforce, slashing more than 4,000 jobs to fund an aggressive push into artificial intelligence. Shares exploded 20% after hours as investors cheered the brutal cost-cutting move from co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey.

Dorsey told employees in an internal memo that the company had grown too big and too slow. He wants Block to become “smaller, flatter, and faster” by the end of 2025. The layoffs are the deepest in the company’s history and come just weeks after Dorsey returned full-time as CEO.

The cuts will drop Block’s headcount from around 12,000 at the start of 2024 to fewer than 6,000. Most departures will happen before Christmas, with some teams losing more than half their people.

Cash App, Square, and Bitcoin Units All Hit Hard

No part of the company is safe. The layoffs touch every major brand:

• Cash App, the fast-growing consumer app
• Square, the seller tools business
• Afterpay, the buy-now-pay-later service
• Spiral, the Bitcoin development team
• TIDAL, the music streaming platform

One Cash App engineer posted on X that his entire 180-person team was wiped out in a single Zoom call that lasted less than five minutes.

Investors Love the Bloodbath

Block stock closed Thursday at $64.48 and then rocketed past $78 in after-hours trading. That 20%+ jump added more than $8 billion to the company’s market value in minutes.

Wall Street analysts called the move “decisive” and “shareholder-friendly.” Many had pushed Dorsey to slash costs after years of heavy spending on moon-shot projects like Bitcoin hardware wallets and celebrity music deals.

Dorsey Bets Everything on AI

In the memo, Dorsey wrote that AI will change money the same way the internet changed communication. He promised the saved money will pour straight into machine-learning teams building new financial tools.

“We are moving from a company that ships features to a company that ships intelligence,” Dorsey said. He compared the shift to the early days of Twitter when speed and focus beat size every time.

Former employees say Block already started hiring dozens of senior AI researchers at higher salaries even while planning the layoffs.

A Painful End to the Growth Party

Just two years ago Block threw lavish parties and handed out huge stock grants to attract talent. Now thousands of workers face the holidays without jobs.

One laid-off designer told reporters, “We built Cash App into a rocket ship and they thanked us with a five-minute call.” Severance packages include three months pay plus benefits, but many say that feels small after years of long hours.

The cuts continue a brutal season in tech. Meta, Amazon, and Google all trimmed staff in 2024, but few moved this fast or this deep in a single day.

Thousands of Block workers woke up Thursday to a future they never expected. While investors celebrate record stock highs, families across San Francisco, Oakland, New York, and remote offices scramble to pay rent and explain the news to their kids. Dorsey got what he wanted: a leaner company racing toward AI. Whether the human cost was worth it will be debated for years, but one thing is clear, the era of endless fintech growth is over.