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From his friendship with Elon Musk to canceling rumors about sending his beard to rapper Azealia Banks, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is leading a life.
Dorsey has had an eventful career in Silicon Valley. After co-founding Twitter on March 21, 2006, he was named the company’s CEO two years later, but returned in 2015 after founding his second company, Square, which he renamed Block in 2021.
He led Twitter through the tech surprise that engulfed social media companies, continually testifying before Congress, then stepping down as Twitter’s CEO in 2021 and nonetheless encouraged Musk’s acquisition of Twitter the following year. Dorsey continues to lead Block, where in April 2022 he replaced his “CEO” name with “Block Head. “
The tech entrepreneur has generated his own controversy and complaint over the years and, like many other billionaires, owns a wonderful home, dates models and drives fast cars.
Here’s what we know about Dorsey’s career progression and his life outside of work.
Rebecca Borison, Madeline Stone, Katie Canales, Bethany Biron and Isobel Asher Hamilton contributed a previous part of this story.
At age 15, Dorsey wrote dispatch software that is still used by some taxi companies, for a biography of Dorsey.
Today, Dorsey doesn’t like pointy hairstyles.
He briefly attended Missouri University of Science and Technology and transferred to New York University before quitting in 1999, a semester before graduating, over his idea for Twitter, according to the biography.
No one else seemed interested, so he put the concept aside for a while, according to a Stanford blog.
It got its license around 2002 by breaking into the tech scene, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Odeo went bankrupt in 2006, so Dorsey returned to his messaging concept and Twitter was born.
Dorsey kept his Twitter account with a simple “@jack. “It has not replaced it since.
Dorsey pulled the ring out of his nose to look like a CEO. He is 30 years old.
In 2008, Williams was CEO and Dorsey became chairman of Twitter’s board of directors.
Dorsey promptly embarked on new projects. He invested in Foursquare and introduced an invoice startup called Square that allows small business owners to settle for credit card bills and an attachment to a smartphone.
Dorsey had to remind Obama to limit his answers to 140 characters, Twitter’s limit at the time.
In 2014, Forbes valued Dorsey’s net worth at $2. 2 billion and reached $12. 5 billion in 2021.
The $1. 40 salary was a pay raise for Dorsey, who in previous years had refused any pay.
He’s the only Silicon Valley tycoon to earn a pittance: Mark Zuckerberg makes $1 a year as Facebook’s chief executive.
“Now you have to say, ‘The BMW is the only car I drive, because it’s the most productive automotive engineering on the planet,’ or whatever,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told The New Yorker in 2013.
The space has perspectives of the Golden Gate Bridge, which Dorsey considers a piece of design.
Dorsey said Musk’s tweets were “focused on solving existential questions and blatantly sharing his thoughts. “
He added that he appreciates all the “ups and downs” similar to Musk’s unpredictable use of the site. Musk himself responded by tweeting his thanks and “Twitter rock!”followed by a series of random emojis.
Both Musk and Dorsey are cryptocurrency enthusiasts and seem to have a friendship.
Dorsey spoke to Rolling Stone about the meal, which took place in 2011. Dorsey said the goat was served raw and that he personally limited himself to a salad.
In 2019, Dorsey gave the impression on a podcast hosted by a fitness guru who in the past had said vaccines cause autism. Dorsey said in his interview that he ate once a day and fasted all weekend. He said the first time he tried fast, he felt like he was hallucinating.
“It was a strange state. But when I did it the next two times, I realized how focused our days are on food and how the delight I had was when I fasted for a long time. How long it has slowed down,” he said.
The comments drew strong complaints from many others who claimed Dorsey normalizes eating disorders.
In a later interview with Wired, Dorsey said he ate seven meals a week, “just dinner. “
Dorsey donned leather jackets and narrow cuts from Prada and Hermès, as well as inverted-collar dress shirts from Dior Homme, a kind of sublime edition of the raised collar.
More recently, he has preferred more daring garments, such as the vintage black turtleneck sweater preferred by Silicon Valley luminaries like Steve Jobs.
Dorsey turns out that in those days he didn’t care about a classical setting.
In 2016, Banks posted on her now-deleted Twitter account that Dorsey had sent her her hair “in an envelope. “Dorsey later told the Huffington Post that the incident occurred.
Dorsey tweeted excitedly about the vacation he took in Myanmar for his birthday in December 2018. “If you’re willing to do a little bit, move on to Myanmar,” he said.
This happened at the height of the Rohingya crisis, and Dorsey came under fire for his gleeful promotion of the country, especially as social media platforms have been accused of being complicit in fueling hatred towards the Rohingya.
In a Huffington Post interview in 2019, Dorsey was asked if Donald Trump, a tweet enthusiast, could be removed from the platform if he called on his followers to murder a journalist. Dorsey gave a confused response that drew harsh criticism.
After the interview was published, Dorsey said he didn’t mind “looking bad. “
“I need to be open about how we think and what we see,” he added.
Dorsey and Sandberg were asked about election interference on Twitter and Facebook and alleged anti-conservative bias through social media corporations at the event.
During the hearing, Dorsey shared a snapshot of his emerging heart rate on Twitter. He remained in the dock for several hours and his heart rate peaked at 109 beats per minute.
Dorsey spoke via video conference about the Senate hearing on Section 230, a component of U. S. law that shields web companies from legal liability for user-generated content, while giving them broad leverage to decide how to moderate their own platforms.
In prepared testimony before the hearing, Dorsey said Section 230 would “collapse the way we talk on the internet” and recommended tactics for tech corporations to make their moderation processes more transparent.
And at the hearing, Dorsey was again accused of anti-conservative bias.
The accusations by Republican lawmakers have focused on how Twitter is enforcing its policies and how it has classified President Trump’s tweets relative to other world leaders.
Dorsey bore the brunt of lawmakers’ questions, though he made the impression along with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
He made that impression at another hearing a few weeks later with Zuckerberg, facing questions from Republicans dissatisfied with President Donald Trump’s handling of social media account platforms.
Dorsey said on the “Tales of the Crypt” podcast that he started taking ice baths and saunas in the evenings around 2016.
You alternately sit in your barrel sauna for 15 minutes and then switch to an ice sauna for 3. Repeat this regime 3 times before completing it with a one-minute iceArray.
He likes to shower on the ice in the morning to wake up.
Page Six reported in September 2018 that the two men were spotted together at Harper’s Bazaar Icons party at New York Fashion Week. Page Six also reported that Dorsey’s exes included actress and model Lily Cole and ballet dancer Sofiane Sylve.
Dorsey’s announcement follows a tour of Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa. “Africa will define the long term (especially Bitcoin!). I don’t know where yet, but I will live here for 3-6 months in mid-2020. ” he wrote on Twitter.
But Dorsey later threatened to be ousted as Twitter’s chief executive through activist investor Elliott Management.
Bloomberg and CNBC reported in late February 2020 that Twitter’s top investor, led by Paul Singer, was looking to upgrade Dorsey.
The reasons given included Dorsey splitting his time between two corporations acting as CEO of Twitter and his fintech corporation Square, as well as his planned move to Africa.
Twitter announced on March 9, 2020 that it had reached an agreement with Elliott Management that would leave Jack Dorsey in the role of CEO.
The deal included a billion-dollar investment from stock firm Silver Lake, and partners from Elliott Management and Silver Lake joined Twitter’s board of directors.
Patrick Pichette, Twitter’s lead independent board director, said he was “confident” they were “on the right track with Jack’s leadership,” but added that a new transience committee would be formed to task the board with comparing Twitter’s leadership.
High-level verified accounts belonging to Bill Gates, Kim Kardashian West, and others have been hacked, with hackers tweeting messages asking users to send Bitcoin bills to fraudulent cryptocurrency addresses.
As a solution, Twitter temporarily blocked all verified accounts (those with blue checkmarks on their profiles), but the damage has already been done.
And Musk said in a July 2020 interview with The New York Times that he contacted Dorsey after the attack.
“Within minutes of posting the post, I immediately received text messages from an organization of other people I know, and then I immediately called Jack, so probably within five minutes my account was blocked,” Musk said.
CNBC was the first to report Dorsey’s expected resignation, citing anonymous sources.
Twitter showed the story on the same day, announcing that CTO Parag Arawal would take over as CEO effective immediately.
Dorsey tweeted, “I’m not sure I’ve heard of it, but I’m leaving Twitter. “
In his tweet he included a screenshot of the email he sent to Twitter announcing his resignation.
In May 2022, his term on the board officially ended, an expected resolution that coincided with the company’s shareholders’ meeting.
“The updated call creates more room for growth,” the company said in a statement.
“Block refers to community blocks where we locate our suppliers, a blockchain, block parties full of music, obstacles to overcome, a code section, building blocks and of course, tungsten cubes,” he adds.
The line about tungsten cubes is an obvious reference to the fashion among cryptocurrency enthusiasts to pay up to $3,500 for elegant tungsten cubes.
The name change was formalized in a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 20, 2022.
“There will be no replacement in Mr. Dorsey’s roles,” the filing says.
Block’s online page has also been updated to include his new Block leader name.
Musk tweeted in reaction to news fireplace emojis to sign his approval for Dorsey’s title.
Musk officially added the name “Technoking” to his position at Tesla in March 2021.
Dorsey is a Bitcoin-specific fan, which he described in early 2019 as “resilient” and “principle-based. “He told the “Tales of the Crypt” podcast in March of that year that he exceeded the $10,000 weekly spending limit at Square’s. Application of cash by purchasing Bitcoin.
In October 2020, he criticized Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong for banning activism through the company’s employees, saying that cryptocurrency is itself a form of activism.
He also said he hoped Bitcoin could help achieve “world peace,” on a panel alongside Musk and Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood, titled “The B Word” in July 2021. He said he enjoyed the Bitcoin network because it was “weird as hell. “”.
“That’s the only explanation for why I have a career: because I’ve learned a lot from other people like the ones who build bitcoins today,” Dorsey said.
Dorsey responded to a Twitter user who mourned Vine’s disappearance by saying, “I know. Regret,” accompanied by a sad-faced emoji.
Twitter acquired the short-video app Vine in 2012, but shut it down in 2016.
In his 84-page report and subsequent testimony, Zatko made a series of allegations against the company, adding that it had “glaring deficiencies” in security protocol and that Dorsey had experienced a “drastic loss of concentration” in his final year at Twitter. CEO. .
Musk accused Twitter of misleading investors and deliberately “miscounting” spam accounts, Insider reported.
In the text messages, Dorsey explained why he left the company and said he had already insisted that Musk get on Twitter.
“A new platform is needed. It can’t be a business. That’s why I left,” Dorsey wrote to Musk, adding that he believes Twitter is an “open source protocol” and can’t “have an advertising model. “
Dorsey also told Musk that he had advocated adding the Tesla CEO to Twitter’s board a year earlier, but that the request was rejected, which he considered “completely stupid and retrograde. “
The blockchain-based company’s beta version generated 30,000 subscriptions in two days. According to Bluesky’s website, the company aims for “a new foundation for social networking that provides creators with platform independence, developers the freedom to create, and users the ability to choose their experience. “
In July 2023, it had more than a million users, Gizmodo reported.
After Musk ordered mass layoffs on Twitter after taking office in November 2022, Dorsey tweeted his apology: “I’m guilty of why everyone is in this situation: I increase the duration of the company too soon. That’s why I’m right. “
“The other Twitter users beyond and beyond are strong and resilient,” he wrote on Twitter. “They will find a way, even if the timing is difficult. I realize that many are angry with me. “
He continued, “I’m grateful and love everyone who has worked at Twitter before. I don’t expect it to be reciprocated now. . . or never. . . And I get it. “
Last year, Dorsey criticized Musk’s resolution to remove the social networking site’s Birdwatch feature from Community Notes, calling it “the most boring Facebook call ever created. “
In April, the Twitter co-founder criticized Musk’s leadership in a series of social media posts on Friday, writing that “everything went wrong” and that Musk “should have pulled out” of the acquisition.
But in July, Dorsey said it was “difficult to manage Twitter” after Musk sparked a backlash by pronouncing “rate limits” for tweeting.
“I don’t wish this tension on anyone,” Dorsey tweeted. I’m sure the team is doing its best despite the limitations that are immense. It’s simple to criticize decisions from afar. . . What am I to blame for. . . but I know the purpose is to see Twitter thrive. He will. “
Dorsey also for the “calm” when Musk changed Twitter’s name to X in July.
He Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , who made misleading statements about the COVID-19 virus, in June for his 2024 presidential campaign.