Jack Dorsey: Outgoing Twitter CEO with an Artist Vision | Jack Dorsey

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Jack Dorsey likes to keep things simple, at least for a 45-year-old billionaire. He eats one meal a day, fasts on the weekends, and tries to meditate for two hours a day. The post that launched Twitter, and eventually a million pile, was just as stern: “Just set up my twttr.”

Dorsey was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1976 and was a self-made computer programmer, using a Macintosh computer that his father had bought for him. In 1999, he dropped out of New York University and moved to California, where he dreamed up a prototype idea on Twitter while co-founding an online delivery and taxi company. The company subsequently failed.

The Twitter story got its start when Dorsey was hired as a programmer at Odeo, a podcast startup run by one of the future Twitter co-founders, Evan Williams. This is where Dorsey appears in Instagram history winner Sarah Frier as one of the fringe characters in the story, trying to make his way in Silicon Valley like so many others.

Dorsey, 29, who dropped out of NYU with an anarchist tattoo and nose ring, considered himself more than an artist. He sometimes dreamed, for example, of becoming a tailor. He was an engineer, but only as a means to an end – to create Something out of nothing, with a code. Also, so he can pay the rent.”

There was enough strong business sense within Dorsey, however, that he co-founded Twttr – soon rebranded to Twitter – with Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass in 2006. Dorsey first became CEO in 2007.

In fact, Dorsey’s artistic mentality was cited, vividly, when he was removed from his CEO position for the first time in 2008. According to Nick Bilton’s Twitter account, Williams told him, “You can either be a tailor or a Twitter CEO. But you can’t. to be both.” Obviously, Dorsey punctuates his main executive duties with breaks for yoga and hot sewing classes.

Dorsey leaves the company with 210 million daily active users and annual revenue of $3.7 billion

Dorsey returned as CEO in 2011, having founded the payment company Square – which is today worth $100 billion – in the meantime. Twitter struggled in the wake of its 2013 rollout, which made Dorsey a billionaire, replacing Dick Costolo as CEO in 2015 while relinquishing the CEO position.

Dorsey leaves the company with 210 million daily active users and annual revenue of $3.7 billion. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, his fortune is $12.3 billion, and he is ranked 174th among the ranks of the world’s richest people. He still owns 2.3% of Twitter.

But turmoil was building over Dorsey’s priorities. In 2019, Dorsey surprised employees and investors by announcing plans to relocate to Africa for up to six months a year. Announcing the move during a month-long trip to the continent, he tweeted from Addis Ababa: “Sad to leave the continent… right now. Africa will determine the future (especially bitcoin!). Not sure where yet, but I will live here for 3- 6 months in the middle of 2020. Glad I was able to try a small part.”

Dorsey, who remains a crypto enthusiast, dropped the plan after the arrival of the coronavirus. But he wouldn’t dissuade activist investor Elliott Management from its view that Twitter was a company that needed more focus at the top. Elliott acquired a stake in Twitter last year and remains the 13th largest contributor to the business, according to financial data firm Refinitiv, with a stake of just over 1%. At the time of the stake building, Elliott’s billionaire owner, Paul Singer, was reported to have been concerned about the fact that Dorsey was holding two key executive positions, at Twitter and Square.

By the end of last year, it appeared Dorsey had weathered the pressure. In November, a panel of Twitter executives said it had “confidence in management and recommended that the current structure remain in place”.

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Much of the innovation that Twitter has demonstrated under Dorsey in recent months has been more about safety than about making money. It has launched experiments that warn users that they are about to engage in a hot conversation and tests “Safe Mode” that blocks accounts for seven days if the tech company’s systems detect them using malicious language or sending repetitive, uninvited replies and signals. In the context of Frances Hogan’s revelations on Facebook and the upcoming UK Internet Security Act, social media companies know they have to focus on protecting users.

In terms of making money, in the US, the company launched Twitter Blue, a product that for $2.99 ​​a month offers a suite of services including a 60-second grace period to edit a tweet before it’s fully published. Expect more money-making initiatives under the new president, chief technology officer Parag Agrawal, who has to achieve ambitious goals: increase the company’s average daily users by more than 50% to 315 million, and more than double revenue to reach $7.5 billion by 2023. .

According to one California-based analyst, now is the time to leave Dorsey, as the social media industry is more competitive than ever.

“Dorsey is one of the pillars of the social media world,” said Dan Ives, managing director of investment firm Wedbush Securities. “These are great shoes to fill in.”

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