Jack Dorsey just fired half of Block’s 10,000 employees. The stock jumped 23%.
Block — the $33 billion fintech company behind Square, Cash App, and Afterpay — announced that it’s cutting more than 4,000 employees, reducing its workforce from over 10,000 to just under 6,000. Not because the business is failing. Because AI made them unnecessary.
Dorsey’s words on X were as blunt as anything a CEO has said publicly: “We’re already seeing that 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. And that’s accelerating rapidly.”
Dorsey explicitly said the business is strong — gross profit grew 24% year-over-year, Cash App profit surged 33%. He says “Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.”
So what’s safe? Things AI can’t do. Like build power plants. Negotiate gas supply contracts. Walk a construction site. Structure a 20-year PPA with a utility. Every AI model runs on a GPU that runs on electricity that comes from a physical asset someone had to permit, finance, and build.
