Who owns Block? Ownership structure explained (2026)

Block is one of the most recognizable names in financial technology, even if most people know it through its products rather than its corporate name. The company sits behind Square, the card reader and point-of-sale system used by millions of small merchants, and Cash App, the money app tens of millions of Americans use to send cash, get paid, and buy bitcoin. It also owns the buy-now-pay-later firm Afterpay and the music service TIDAL.

That collection of businesses trades as a single public company, which means anyone can buy a piece of it. Yet ownership of Block is not as open as its public listing suggests. The company uses a dual-class share structure that hands its co-founder, Jack Dorsey, voting control far larger than his economic stake. Understanding who owns Block means separating who owns the equity from who controls the votes.

This article explains Block's share structure, who its largest shareholders are, how Dorsey retains control despite owning a small slice of the company, and what that concentration of power means for investors and users.

Block, Inc. is a financial technology company headquartered in Oakland, California. It was founded in 2009 as Square, Inc. by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey, who built the original business around a small white card reader that let any merchant accept payments through a phone. McKelvey, a glassblower, had lost a sale because he could not take a credit card, and the pair set out to fix that problem.

The company went public on the NYSE in 2015 under the ticker SQ. In December 2021 it renamed itself Block to signal a broader identity spanning consumer finance, bitcoin, and merchant tools rather than just the Square brand. Today Block operates a portfolio of businesses under one public parent:

Block reported $10.36 billion in total gross profit for 2025, up 17% year over year, and delivered $6.62 billion in revenue in the second quarter of 2026. Its market capitalization stood near $48 billion in August 2026, with the stock trading around $80 and roughly 601 million shares outstanding. Investors often convert top-line figures like these into an operating-profit measure such as EBITDA to compare Block with other payment firms.

Block is publicly traded. Its Class A common stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker XYZ, with a secondary listing on the Australian Securities Exchange under the same symbol. The company changed its ticker from SQ to XYZ effective January 21, 2025, aligning its market symbol with the Block corporate name and its ecosystem of brands.

Because Block is public, its owners are its shareholders. But those shareholders do not hold equal power. The company splits its stock into two classes, and that split is the defining feature of who really controls Block.

Block uses a dual-class structure that separates economic ownership from voting control. Class A shares, the ones that trade publicly, carry one vote each. Class B shares, held almost entirely by insiders, carry ten votes each. This design lets the founders keep decision-making power even as they sell down their economic stake.

The effect is large. Reporting on Block's proxy filings has noted that Dorsey and McKelvey together have held under 11% of the company's shares while controlling close to half of the shareholder vote. As of recent filings, holders of Class B stock controlled roughly 52% of total voting power.

Jack Dorsey is Block's largest individual power holder. According to Block's 2026 proxy statement, Dorsey held roughly 1 million Class A shares, under 1% of that class, and about 47.8 million Class B shares, or close to 79% of all Class B stock. Combined, those holdings gave him about 42% of Block's total voting power. His economic ownership is far smaller, in the high single digits as a percentage of shares outstanding, because Class B shares carry ten times the votes.

Dorsey holds much of this stock through a revocable trust and a philanthropic entity called Start Small, over which he retains sole voting authority. Co-founder Jim McKelvey holds the remaining meaningful block of Class B shares, adding to founder control.

This gap between votes and equity is the central fact of Block's ownership. Dorsey does not own the company outright, but his super-voting shares give him effective control over shareholder decisions.

Outside the founders, Block's largest owners are institutional asset managers that hold Class A stock. Vanguard Group is the single largest institutional holder, with roughly 8.9% of the Class A shares. T. Rowe Price holds around 7.7%, and BlackRock about 5.2%. These firms appear among Block's top holders largely because Block sits in major stock indexes, not out of strategic interest in the company.

These institutions own a large share of Block's economic value but a much smaller share of its votes, because they hold single-vote Class A stock rather than the ten-vote Class B shares concentrated with Dorsey. Their influence over Block is limited by the dual-class design. This pattern of heavy index-fund ownership paired with founder voting control is common among founder-led tech companies, and it mirrors the structure at consumer-finance peers like Robinhood.

Block shareholders have had a direct chance to unwind this structure and declined it. A proposal that would have collapsed the dual-class system and moved Block to one-share-one-vote failed at a shareholder meeting, in part because Dorsey's own super-voting shares count toward the result. The structure therefore remains in place, and any future change would effectively require Dorsey's consent.

Jack Dorsey holds the most control at Block. He is co-founder, chairman, and the company's chief executive, a role Block styles as Block Head. His super-voting shares reinforce that operational authority with formal voting power. Dorsey has led the company since its 2009 founding as Square, apart from the years he split his time running Twitter, and he returned his full focus to Block after leaving the social network.

Amrita Ahuja is Block's second most powerful executive. She serves as chief financial officer and chief operating officer, and Block gives her the internal title Foundational Lead, overseeing finance, legal, and people functions. She also chairs Block's industrial bank, Square Financial Services. Ahuja has run Block's finances since 2019 and has been the public face of the company's cost discipline and its shift toward artificial-intelligence-driven operations.

Block's board is chaired by Dorsey, who is not classified as independent under NYSE rules. Because of that, the board has appointed Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital, as Lead Independent Director. Other directors include co-founder Jim McKelvey, musician and entrepreneur Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter, who joined after Block acquired TIDAL, and technology and finance figures such as Paul Deighton and Neha Narula. What is confirmed is that Dorsey holds decisive voting control. What is inferred is how much independent directors can practically constrain him, given that the dual-class structure limits the power of any outside shareholder.

The most persistent governance concern at Block is the gap between ownership and control. A single founder directing roughly 42% of the vote while owning less than 10% of the equity means outside shareholders have little ability to force change if performance disappoints. Governance advocates have criticized the super-voting structure, and shareholders have formally proposed dismantling it, but the same structure that concentrates power also protects it from being voted away.

Block's consumer app has drawn repeated regulatory action, and the liability sits with the parent company. In January 2025, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Block to pay up to $175 million over failures in how Cash App handled fraud. Separately, 48 state financial regulators reached a coordinated settlement in which Block agreed to pay an $80 million fine for weaknesses in its anti-money-laundering program, and the New York Department of Financial Services secured a further $40 million penalty. Regulators tied the problems to Cash App's rapid growth outpacing its compliance systems.

In March 2023, short-seller Hindenburg Research published a report alleging that Cash App inflated its user numbers and made it easy for fraudsters to operate. Block rejected the claims and defended its metrics, but the report drew regulatory and investor attention and fed into the broader compliance scrutiny that followed.

In February 2026, Block announced it would cut more than 4,000 jobs, close to half its roughly 10,205-person workforce, as it moved to center operations around AI. The stock rose sharply on the news, but the scale of the reduction raised questions about execution risk and the human cost of the shift. Because Dorsey controls the vote, the strategy proceeds on his conviction rather than shareholder consensus.

Ownership shapes who decides Block's direction, and at Block the answer is unusually concentrated. Buying Block stock means buying into a company where one person controls roughly 42% of the vote. That founder control can be a strength, letting Block make long-term bets on bitcoin, hardware, and AI without pressure from activist shareholders. Weighing those bets against rivals in each sector is the kind of work a structured market analysis supports. It can also be a weakness, because it removes the main check that public markets normally place on management.

For investors, the practical consequence is that a bet on Block is a bet on Dorsey's judgment. His enthusiasm for bitcoin, from Cash App's trading features to the Bitkey wallet and the Proto mining business, reflects personal conviction as much as a market opportunity. Shareholders who disagree with that direction have limited recourse, since they cannot outvote him and cannot easily replace the board he chairs.

For users, ownership matters because Block's products run through a large regulated public company rather than a startup. The CFPB and state settlements show that Block, not a small team, is accountable for how Cash App treats customers. That scale brings resources for compliance and security, but the settlements also show how fast growth can outrun those safeguards. Block competes directly with PayPal in consumer payments and with crypto platforms like Coinbase in bitcoin, so its owner's willingness to fund product and compliance investment shapes the experience across the wider payments industry.

Jack Dorsey is the chief executive of Block, a role the company styles as Block Head. He co-founded the company in 2009 as Square, serves as chairman of the board, and holds decisive voting control through super-voting Class B shares.

Yes. Block, Inc. trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker XYZ, with a secondary listing on the Australian Securities Exchange under the same symbol. It changed its ticker from SQ to XYZ in January 2025. Anyone can buy Class A shares, though those shares carry only one vote each.

Block was co-founded in 2009 by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey, originally under the name Square, Inc. The company built its first product around a card reader that let small merchants accept payments through a phone, and renamed itself Block in December 2021.

The largest single power holder is co-founder Jack Dorsey, who controls about 42% of Block's total voting power through super-voting Class B shares, despite owning under 10% of the economic equity. The biggest outside shareholders are index-fund managers, led by Vanguard, T. Rowe Price, and BlackRock, which hold single-vote Class A stock.

Block carried a market capitalization near $48 billion in August 2026, with the stock trading around $80. The company reported $10.36 billion in total gross profit for 2025 and $6.62 billion in revenue for the second quarter of 2026.

Block's dual-class share structure gives Class B shares ten votes each and Class A shares one vote each. Dorsey holds the large majority of Class B stock, so his voting power, near 42%, far exceeds his economic stake, which is in the high single digits. Shareholders have proposed ending this structure but have not succeeded in removing it.