Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina）
Author | Azuma (@azuma_eth）
In the early hours of today Beijing time, Jack Dorsey (also the founder of Twitter) announced a large-scale layoff plan by his fintech company Block — it will cut nearly 4,000 positions, reducing the total number of employees from over 10,000 to less than 6,000, in order to promote a more streamlined, flat, and AI-centered organizational structure.
Jack Dorsey himself is a fervent Bitcoin loyalist, adhering to Bitcoin Maximalist ideology, believing that Bitcoin will ultimately become the native currency of the internet world. Block is also deeply intertwined with Bitcoin in its business; besides directly holding Bitcoin on its balance sheet, while providing trading, wallet, mining, and other product services, Block is also a long-term sponsor of Bitcoin core developers.
But this is not the focus of this article — what this article really wants to emphasize is that unlike other companies that have been forced to lay off due to business contraction, Block is choosing to cut nearly 40% of its positions during a period of simultaneous growth in revenue and profit margins, and while laying off employees, Block has also raised its 2026 gross profit guidance to $12.2 billion.
Jack Dorsey addressed the reason for this decision in the announcement: “Some things have changed. We have seen that the smart tools we are building and using, combined with smaller, flatter teams, are giving rise to a completely new way of working — this fundamentally changes the meaning of building and operating a company, and this change is rapidly accelerating... Rather than passively accepting change and slowly laying off staff over the next few months or years, it is better to actively seek change now.”
The change that Jack Dorsey mentioned is not novel — the rapid development of AI is iterating traditional productivity growth paradigms. In the past, companies had to rely on linear growth in the number of employees to achieve productivity gains and expanded business scale; but today, thanks to rapidly evolving AI tools, companies can achieve exponential productivity growth while maintaining or even reducing employee numbers.
Prominent overseas figures 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 employees last month while announcing record orders; Salesforce laid off 5,000 employees after AI began handling 50% of customer interactions; Amazon laid off 16,000 employees last January and another 14,000 in October… all these companies were still on a growth trend when they made their layoff decisions. Jack Dorsey merely articulated what everyone already tacitly acknowledged, which is that AI tools, combined with smaller teams, have completely changed the way of operating a company.”
What is even more noteworthy is that after Block announced its layoff plan, the capital market quickly expressed its attitude — Block's stock price surged by 20%, with its market value increasing by nearly $6 billion, which means that for every position cut, approximately $1.5 million of corporate value was created.
AI is set to disrupt the job market and eliminate certain professions, which has long been a societal consensus, but many people still underestimate the speed at which this change is occurring. In the past few weeks, we have witnessed Anthropic’s “dimensional reduction strike” affecting multiple industries including SaaS; we have seen the 30 million-views article “2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” stirring public sentiment; now it is Block that is actively slimming down and not hiding the reason.
Another counterintuitive reality is that people once believed the threat of AI to occupations would follow a gradual order from "low-end to high-end", but in reality, due to the immaturity of physical interaction fields, AI is beginning to eliminate white-collar jobs that the market used to regard as relatively middle or high-end. This reason is not complicated; white-collar work essentially involves performing “input → processing → output” tasks based on specific industry standards, and this is exactly 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 of compensation for each year worked, along with a $5,000 transition allowance. Furthermore, Block will continue to pay medical insurance for employees for 6 months and allow them to retain company equipment. The compensation terms are decent, but for this group of laid-off employees, many of whom are white-collar workers already facing threats from AI for numerous positions, it is time to contemplate how to avoid being eliminated in the age of AI.
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