Chopping Block

Inside Jack Dorsey's Decision to Replace 4,000 Workers with AI

De: Randy Chia

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The stock closed at $54.53. By dinner, it was trading above $67 — an eight-billion-dollar gain created by the elimination of four thousand jobs.

On February 26, 2026, Block CEO Jack Dorsey posted a memo — in his signature lowercase — announcing the largest AI-driven workforce reduction in corporate history. Not a gradual wind-down. Not a quiet restructuring. A single cut: from over 10,000 employees to just under 6,000.

The company wasn’t in crisis. Gross profit was up 24%. Revenue was accelerating. By every conventional metric, Block was thriving. Dorsey said the AI tools had gotten good enough. The market agreed — and added $8 billion to Block’s value overnight.

Chopping Block is the definitive account of how one company spent two years preparing for that day. Drawing on SEC filings, earnings call transcripts, engineering blog posts, podcast interviews, and public statements from Block’s leadership, this book reconstructs the full arc:

The Bloat. How pandemic hiring tripled Block’s headcount while gross profit per employee stayed flat for five years.

The Flatten. How Dorsey dismantled the siloed business-unit structure and rebuilt Block as a single functional organization — making the company legible to machines.

The Tool. How an AI agent called Goose, built by a single engineer and open-sourced to the world, spread from a coding tool to a platform used by 60% of Block’s workforce every week.

The Cut. How Dorsey chose a single decisive stroke over years of gradual attrition — and why Wall Street rewarded him for it.

The Aftermath. What the remaining 6,000 employees found when they came to work the next day, and what the decision means for every company watching.

This is not a book about whether AI is good or bad. It is a book about what happens when a CEO looks at the productivity data, looks at the stock price, looks at the tools his engineers have built — and decides that the math points to fewer people.

“I don’t think we’re early to this realization. I think most companies are late.” — Jack Dorsey, February 26, 2026