Wall Street loves a layoff. Jack Dorsey's payment company Block announced it's slashing 4,000 jobs—nearly half its workforce—and investors rewarded the move with a 24% stock surge in extended trading.

The numbers tell a stark story. Block employed roughly 8,500 people before the cuts. Now it's down to about 4,500. That's not a restructuring. That's a wholesale gutting of the organization.

Dorsey framed the move as necessary for "efficiency" and predicted other tech companies would follow suit "within the next year." Translation: Silicon Valley is about to get a lot smaller, and executives are betting shareholders will applaud rather than question whether these companies over-hired in the first place.

The stock market's reaction reveals everything wrong with how we measure corporate success. Four thousand people lose their livelihoods, and the company is suddenly worth billions more. The disconnect isn't subtle.

Block's core businesses—Square and Cash App—have been struggling to justify their pandemic-era valuations. Revenue growth has slowed. Competition from traditional payment processors has intensified. Rather than innovate their way out, management chose the Wall Street playbook: cut costs, boost margins, watch the stock price climb.

Here's what the cheerleading analysts won't tell you: companies that slash workforce this dramatically often struggle to execute when market conditions improve. You can't just flip a switch and rehire institutional knowledge. You can't rebuild teams and culture after traumatic cuts without years of effort.

The reporting suggests AI automation played a role in determining which positions became "redundant." That's convenient corporate spin. AI didn't make strategic decisions about Block's business model. AI didn't over-hire during the pandemic boom. Executives did.

Dorsey's prediction that others will follow is probably accurate. But it's not prescient analysis—it's peer pressure disguised as trend forecasting. When one major tech CEO announces massive layoffs and gets rewarded with a stock pop, the incentive structure becomes crystal clear for every other board and executive team.

The question shareholders should be asking: If Block needed 8,500 employees six months ago and only 4,500 today, was management asleep at the wheel? Either they massively over-staffed, or they're now dangerously under-resourced. Neither scenario suggests operational excellence.

For the 4,000 workers losing jobs, the stock price is irrelevant. They're updating résumés and wondering how long severance will last. For Dorsey, who still owns significant equity, that 24% jump means his net worth increased by hundreds of millions overnight.

That's not efficiency. That's wealth transfer, dressed up in MBA jargon.