Jack Dorsey just cut 4,000 jobs at Block — nearly half the company — and proudly announced it was because of AI. Not a restructuring. Not a pivot. He looked at thousands of people who built his platform and said a chatbot could do their jobs better. This is now the largest single workforce reduction explicitly blamed on AI in corporate history, and Dorsey is wearing it like a badge of honor. The stock went up. Of course it did.
Here’s the part that should make you sick: some of those workers got “quickly rehired.” Meaning they were fired, stripped of their equity vesting schedules and seniority, then brought back at presumably worse terms to train the systems replacing them. That’s not a labor strategy. That’s a hostage negotiation. Meanwhile 2026 is on pace for 264,000 tech layoffs and $8.4 billion in lost wages, but every CEO with a quarterly earnings call keeps telling us AI is going to “create more jobs than it destroys.” Show me where. Because right now all I see is billionaires discovering they can replace payroll with API calls and call it progress.