Jack Dorsey, former CEO of Twitter/X and current CEO of Block, a fintech company, just fired 4,000 people with a single tweet.
There are a few things worth noting.
Most of those things will make people very unhappy and potentially frustrated. But there is a silver lining. Sort of.
Yep, it's because of AI
Let's start with the 'why'.
Block cut nearly half of its workforce because of AI.
Jack Dorsey used legalese to explain this.
"We're not making this decision because we're in trouble. Our business is strong. [But] we're already seeing that the [artificial] 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.
Translated: AI is making this possible. From 10,000 to 6,000 employees.
And it gets worse: Block stock went up. Because of course it did.
X users asked Grok to summarise the tweet (or post, as Musk calls it) and translate from corporate speak.
And Grok was equally brutal.
"We're slashing the company from 10k to under 6k people because AI plus tiny teams now let us do the same work with way fewer bodies, and the CEO would rather gut half the staff in one brutal move than bleed out slowly over years," Grok wrote.
Still, there's a silver lining. Sort of.
The US isn't exactly the most generous country in the world when it comes to things like welfare and severance, but this is what Block will be offering, according to Dorsey.
- [Your] salary for 20 weeks plus one week per year of tenure
- Equity vested through the end of May [no further details shared publicly]
- Six months of health care
- [Your] corporate devices
- $5,000 "put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition"
