By Blake Montgomery
Publication Date: 2026-03-03 16:00:00
Jack Dorsey cited AI as the driving force behind his company’s layoff of 40% of its employees, but other factors such as a weak crypto market, overstaffing and a falling stock price may have motivated the move.
Last week, financial technology company Block announced it would lay off 4,000 of its 10,000 employees. Dorsey, Block’s CEO, said in a letter to shareholders that advances in AI have “changed what it means to build and run a company.”
“We’re already seeing it internally. A significantly smaller team can achieve more and better results with the tools we’re building. And the capabilities of the intelligence tools are getting faster every week,” he wrote. He also said that Block’s business remains strong and that these cuts are not an austerity measure.
Can AI power 40% of a business? Maybe, but there are other ghosts in Dorsey’s company.
The CEO, and therefore Block, has been fully focused on crypto for almost a decade and in 2021 renamed itself from Square to…
