Neal Freiman

Block shares spiked nearly 20% after Dorsey's announcement.

Now, Anne, I thought the reaction to this was very interesting.

On the one hand, you had people saying, yep, this is it.

The AI jobs apocalypse has begun.

If you work a desk job, you are not safe.

But there was a strong pushback as well, with others arguing Dorsey was just using AI as an excuse to trim a workforce that had become far too bloated during COVID.

Where do you stand on that?

Right.

Axios' Dan Primack said, if CEOs get comfortable that this is OK and shareholders will reward them for it, it could set off a stunning layoff wave.

So that's one side of the camp where

basically ceos have license now they will get rewarded for laying off people citing ai the other camp is saying well look block is not doing well the stock is down 80 percent they have they had a 10 000 person work workforce and when you compare that to other fintech companies that's just a much bigger workforce robin hood has 2 500 employees they have a market cap more than twice that

of Block.

Coinbase has 4,500 employees, a market cap of $50 billion, $20 billion more than Block itself.

And now Block is going to be 6,000 employees.

So I think the skeptics are coming out and saying this doesn't necessarily validate that Citrini research paper that was the talk of Wall Street earlier this week, which said that we're about to see a white-collar jobs apocalypse because of AI.

No, this was just Jack Dorsey.

It's not overhiring during the pandemic.

It is now trying to correct it.

Okay, let's move on.

The United States is experiencing something that it hasn't seen since the Great Depression.