In November 2022, Elon Musk marched into the headquarters of Twitter, fresh off acquiring the company, and began slashing its headcount, with about half of its 7,500-strong workforce gone in the first batch of layoffs.
Just over three years later, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has delivered cuts of a similar scale at his payments company Block, reducing staff from 10,000 to around 6,000.
This time, though, Dorsey says the motivation is less the financial wreckage of an overleveraged takeover and a sluggish core business, and more a bet on the future of artificial intelligence.
“A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better. And intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster every week,” Dorsey said in a letter to shareholders, explicitly linking the cuts to the AI tremors rattling through equity markets.
