The co-founder of X (previously Twitter), Jack Dorsey, is reportedly firing around 1,000 employees from his finance company via email.
On Tuesday, Mr Dorsey sent an email to Block staff members informing them of the job losses at the financial services behemoth that owns Square, Tidal and Cash App.
According to TechCrunch, which shared the email, Mr Dorsey, who established Block in 2009 under the name Square, informed employees that the business would be “making some org changes, including eliminating roles and beginning the consultation process in countries where required.”
According to the tech mogul, employee firings can be divided into three categories: 391 employees for “strategy” reasons, 460 employees for “performance” reasons, and 80 managers who are to be let go to simplify and flatten Block's hierarchy.
In addition to cutting 938 posts, the corporation is closing 784 open positions, excluding candidates in vital operating or key leadership roles and those who have advanced to offer stages.
Mr Dorsey refuted claims that the sackings were made for budgetary reasons or to substitute artificial intelligence for human labour. They were for “raising the bar and acting faster on performance”, he said in the email.
The mass sackings are similar to Elon Musk's mass firing email in November 2022, which took place a month after he closed the $44 billion deal to buy X.
In an email titled “a fork in the road” employees were given a deadline: either agree to “extremely hardcore” working conditions to create what he dubbed “Twitter 2.0” or receive three months of severance compensation and depart.
Mr Musk claimed to have cut X's personnel by roughly 80 per cent by April 2023.
CEO of Twitter
In 2021, Mr Dorsey announced his resignation as chief executive of Twitter (now X), the social media platform he co-founded in 2006.
It ended the tech entrepreneur’s second stint at the company, which had grown to more than 350 million active monthly users at the time.
The platform was first created as a prototype in 2006 by Mr Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams – all then employees at podcasting firm Odeo, who were said to have been looking for a new direction for the company.
On March 21, 2006, Mr Dorsey sent the first public tweet as the group began testing the platform – a message that read “just setting up my twttr”.
The company officially launched as Twttr in July that year before changing to Twitter shortly after.
In 2007, having started to quickly gain users, Twitter was spun off as its own start-up, Mr Dorsey was named chief executive, and the company secured a first round of major investment funding.
But alongside the further investment and growing public interest, there were questions raised – including by the board – over Mr Dorsey’s ability to lead the company, following issues such as the site repeatedly crashing.
By late 2008 he was pushed out as chief executive and replaced by fellow co-founder Williams, but remained on the board as chairman.
Away from the day-to-day running of Twitter, Mr Dorsey went on to create mobile payment firm Square (now Block) in 2009, after an old friend from his home town of St Louis found he was unable to sell some glass taps for about two thousand dollars because he had no way of accepting credit cards.
They decide to create a mobile credit card reader that could be plugged into the headphone jack of a smartphone – which would become Square’s first product.
Then in 2011 Mr Dorsey made a full return to Twitter, shortly after his replacement Evan Williams was ousted. He came in as executive chairman with a focus on product development and then chief operating officer Dick Costolo became chief executive.
When Twitter went public in November 2013, Mr Dorsey became a billionaire. But by 2015 the share price was slumping and the platform had been facing stuttering growth.
Resignation from Twitter
Costolo resigned as chief executive in 2015 and Mr Dorsey agreed to step back in as interim chief executive, before making the role permanent three months later.
not sure anyone has heard but,
— jack (@jack) November 29, 2021
I resigned from Twitter pic.twitter.com/G5tUkSSxkl
In the years that followed a number of major changes and new features were added to the site, most notably the doubling of the character limit of a tweet from 140 to 280 in November 2017.
The platform’s blue tick verification system was paused in 2018 and Mr Dorsey himself admitted publicly at the time it was “broken”. It was reintroduced this year with a new process for verifying prominent accounts.
In 2020, Mr Dorsey came under pressure from Paul Singer, the billionaire founder of hedge fund Elliott – a Twitter investor – to step down again as the company’s chief executive. Elliott and Mr Singer said that Mr Dorsey should not be chief executive of both Square and Twitter, before reaching a deal with the technology firm over the issue.
Mr Dorsey and Twitter played a key role in the fallout from the 2020 US presidential election when, having added warning labels to tweets from Donald Trump and his supporters falsely claiming election fraud, Twitter became one of the first platforms to ban Mr Trump for inciting violence at the January 6, 2021 riots. A number of other platforms would follow suit.
In November 2021 Mr Dorsey was replaced as chief executive by Parag Agrawal, the company's former chief technology officer. He left Twitter’s board in May 2022 but kept his role as chief executive of Block.
In October 2022, when Mr Musk purchased Twitter, he retained his 2.4 per cent stake.
Bluesky
Mr Dorsey became a member of the board of directors of Bluesky Social, a Twitter spin-off that is creating a decentralised social networking protocol and application, in February 2022. He then resigned in May 2024.
In a 2024 interview, Dorsey said two of the main reasons he left Bluesky were the company’s move towards a typical corporate structure and the implementation of centralised moderation tools.
