TL;DR

Block, the fintech company behind Square and Cash App, is cutting more than 4,000 jobs — nearly half its workforce — as CEO Jack Dorsey bets that AI tools and smaller teams represent a fundamentally new way of running a company.

A profitable company making a pre-emptive move

Dorsey was explicit that the cuts are not a response to financial trouble. “Our business is strong. Gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving,” he said in a post on X. The company will shrink from over 10,000 employees to fewer than 6,000.

Instead, Dorsey framed the decision as a deliberate strategic shift. “The intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company,” he wrote. He opted for a single large cut rather than gradual reductions, saying he would “rather take a hard, clear action now” than manage a slow decline toward the same outcome.

A shareholder-facing bet

The layoffs were announced alongside Block’s Q4 2025 earnings. In a shareholder letter, Dorsey stated: “We believe Block will be significantly more valuable as a smaller, faster, intelligence-native company. Everything we do from here is in service of that.”

Looking forward

Block’s move is among the largest AI-motivated workforce reductions to date, and one of the few where a CEO has openly attributed mass layoffs to a bet on AI productivity rather than cost-cutting. Whether the remaining workforce can maintain service quality at this scale will test the “intelligence-native” thesis in practice.