Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author | Azuma (@azuma_eth)
In the early hours of this morning Beijing time, financial technology company Block, led by Jack Dorsey (also the founder of Twitter), announced a large-scale layoff plan — nearly 4,000 positions will be cut, reducing the total number of employees from over 10,000 to less than 6,000, in order to promote a leaner, flatter, and AI-centric organizational structure.
Jack Dorsey himself is a fervent Bitcoin maximalist, believing that Bitcoin will ultimately become the native currency of the internet. Block's business is also deeply intertwined with Bitcoin. In addition to directly holding Bitcoin on its balance sheet and providing trading, wallet, and mining products and services, Block is also a long-term funder of Bitcoin core developers.
But this is not the focus of this article — the key point this article aims to emphasize is that, unlike other companies forced to lay off employees due to business contraction, Block is proactively choosing to cut nearly 40% of its positions during a period of growth in both business revenue and profit margins. Simultaneously with the layoffs, Block has further raised its 2026 gross profit guidance to $12.2 billion.
Jack Dorsey explained the reason for this decision in the announcement: "Something has changed. We have seen that the intelligent tools we are building and using, combined with smaller, flatter teams, are giving rise to a new way of working — this fundamentally changes the meaning of building and operating a company, and this change is accelerating rapidly... Rather than passively accepting the change and slowly laying off employees over the next few months or years, it is better to proactively adapt now."
The change mentioned by Jack Dorsey is not new — the rapid development of AI is iterating the traditional paradigm of productivity growth. In the past, enterprises mainly relied on linear growth in employee numbers to increase productivity and expand business scale; but now, with the help of rapidly evolving AI tools, enterprises can achieve exponential growth in productivity while maintaining or even reducing the number of employees.
Overseas influencer and product growth expert Aakash Gupta pointed out that Block is not the first company to make this decision: "Block is not an isolated case. ASML laid off 1,700 people last month while also announcing record order numbers; Salesforce laid off 5,000 people after AI began handling 50% of customer interactions; Amazon laid off 16,000 people in January last year and another 14,000 in October... All these companies were still in a growth trend when they made the decision to lay off employees. Jack Dorsey is just saying out loud what everyone has been tacitly acknowledging, that AI tools combined with smaller team size have completely changed the way a company is operated."
More notably, after Block announced its layoff plan, the capital market quickly gave its response — Block's stock price surged 20%, increasing its market value by nearly $6 billion on the spot. This means that for every position cut, about $1.5 million in enterprise value was created.
It has long been a social consensus that AI will disrupt the job market and eliminate some professions, but many people still underestimate the speed at which this change is arriving. In the past few weeks, we have witnessed the 'dimensionality reduction' impact of Anthropic on multiple industries such as SaaS; seen the 30 million reads of '2028 Global Intelligence Crisis' stirring public sentiment; and now we have Block proactively downsizing without concealing the reason.
Another counterintuitive reality is that while people once believed the threat of AI eliminating jobs would follow a gradual sequence 'from low-end to high-end,' the actual situation is that, due to the immaturity in the field of physical interaction, the first to be eliminated by AI are the white-collar jobs that the market once considered relatively mid-to-high-end. The reason is not complicated: the essence of white-collar work is to perform 'input → processing → output' of information based on specific industry standards, and this is precisely the area where AI large models excel.
In this round of layoffs at Block, affected employees will receive 20 weeks of salary plus an additional week's compensation for each year of service, as well as a $5,000 transition grant. Additionally, Block will continue to provide health insurance for employees for 6 months and allow them to keep their company equipment. The compensation conditions are quite good, but for these laid-off employees and the many positions already threatened by AI, it is time to think about how to avoid being eliminated in the AI era.
