It's been some time since we've heard from former Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, but he's still alive and kicking and now laying off employees at his financial tech firm Block. The Guardian reports that Block—which runs music streaming service Tidal, money transfer app Cash App, and the payment platforms Square and Afterpay—is excising about 750 open positions and moving nearly 200 managers to nonmanagement roles, for a total of almost 1,000 impacted roles.
TechCrunch notes that's about 8% of the company's full roster. In his memo to staff, Dorsey—who said that the layoffs ranked as "the toughest part of my job"—noted that the cuts weren't for financial reasons or because AI was replacing workers. Rather, it was a strategic decision in the company's latest attempts at a reorganization, he wrote, in the hopes of "raising the bar and acting faster on performance, and flattening our org so we can move faster and with less abstraction." The company had previously laid off another 1,000 employees in January 2024.
Around that time, Dorsey said that Block would keep its head count at about 12,000 employees; a February regulatory filing showed it claimed about 11,300 staffers around the globe as of December, per Pymnts. "Why do this all at once instead of over time? We're behind in our actions, and that's not fair to the individuals who work here or the company," Dorsey wrote in his most recent memo. "When we know, we should move, and there hasn't been enough movement. We need to move to help us meet and stay ahead of the transformational moment our industry is in." The Guardian notes that Block's stock is down 29% this year so far. Read Dorsey's memo in full here. (More Block stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
