The substance of the debate might be new, but the deeper framework is not. Ever since there’s been a Silicon Valley, its leaders have worked hard to burnish their images as disruptors and trailblazers by flipping the narrative when they build mistakes or decide that rules are inconvenient. Overviewing privacy concerns and misinformation becomes “relocate quick and break things.” A weak board and governance structure is protecting the founder’s vision. A toxic work culture obtains reframed as a meritocracy. Demanding employees work 100 hours a week is not exploitation but modifying the world from inside a mission-driven company.
“Telling stories is one of the core activities of Silicon Valley,” Stanford University professor Fred Turner informed me. “It’s as important as creating devices.” Turner, a leading expert on the intersection of Silicon Valley culture and technology, has long chronicled how mythcreating is essential to the sector’s success. Establishing the industest’s divine mission in creating a utopian future lets it skirt the normal laws of gravity — whether that’s regulation or unionization. “The profits spin back as evidence not just of monetary success but of moral success,” Turner states.
The Valley has practiced this art for decades. Steve Jobs supported invent tech’s myth structure, marketing Apple Inc. as a countercultural rebel that would free its utilizers from conformity. Its famous 1984 Super Bowl ad cast the arrival of its Macintosh computer as a tool for smashing an authoritarian, dystopian future. Google cemented its “don’t be evil” mantra in its 2004 IPO filing. WeWork Inc. informed investors it wasn’t a real estate company leasing office space to tenants but rather a platform for “elevating the world’s consciousness.” Over at Tesla Inc., shareholders have finishured extreme volatility in service of its planet-saving mission.
Dorsey’s announcement fits squarely within that tradition. Veteran tech journalist and investor Om Malik called it “classic narrative substitution, a tool where you replace one story with another to reframe the situation.” Dorsey turned a press release about layoffs into a declaration about the future of technology. The cuts, in his notifying, reflect not questionable business decisions but instead a prescient structural alter that other forward-believeing companies will soon adopt. It’s a message the market likes to hear; the stock, which had been down some 40% since the start of 2025, has jumped about 22%.
The AI transformation narrative ignores what obtained the company to this point — much of which the Wall Street Journal has detailed. Dorsey started Block (formerly known as Square Inc.) in 2009 after he was pushed out of Twitter, reportedly for poor management. But just as he was taking the fintech company public in 2015, he rejoined Twitter as CEO. Dorsey had developed a reputation as an “absentee executive” and the dual CEO titles did not support convince investors that either company had enough of his attention. (Neither did the 10-day trip to Myanmar for a silent meditation retreat or plans to relocate to Africa for a few months, which were foiled by the pandemic.)
To manage both roles, Dorsey delegated more responsibilities to his lieutenants at Square, who sometimes clashed. Making matters worse, Dorsey revealed little interest in intervening. That led to staff turnover at the top and contributed to the company building duplicate business functions for its Cash App and Square operations. (The company did away with this model during a reorganization in 2024.)Dorsey had limited involvement in the acquisition of Afterpay, the company’s largegest deal, but homed in on acquireing an 86% stake in music-streaming service Tidal after hanging out with Jay-Z in the Hamptons. When a pension-fund shareholder sued for breach of fiduciary duty over the deal, a judge dismissed the case but called the acquisition “a terrible business decision.”
During the tech sector’s pandemic-era boom, when headcount became one of the industest’s reigning barometers of success, Block joined the herd and tripled its employee base. Dorsey acknowledged on X last week that the company over-hired. This wasn’t the first time Dorsey mistakenly swelled the ranks. In 2022, after Elon Musk acquired Twitter and slashed its staff by 80%, Dorsey apologized for having grown the company’s size too quickly.
Dorsey also has struggled with the optics of the announcement around Block’s job cuts. Press reports have pointed to a three-day party celebrating the company’s 16th anniversary that cost more than $60 million just six months earlier. On a video call with employees the day of the news, Dorsey wore a hat that stated “LOVE,” with the New York Times reporting that one employee questioned if that was the right fashion decision while gutting the company. His message to employees, in all lowercase, stood in contrast to the formal letter to investors, leading John Gruber to write on his “Daring Fireball” blog that it’s “a notifying sign about who he respects.”
So did AI have something to do with Block’s cuts? Sure. But that can’t erase the company’s missteps. Where Dorsey has proved most adept is in knowing the right story to notify and sustaining the myth. Becautilize in Silicon Valley, the best way to relocate past a mistake is to just call it the future.
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