Jack Dorsey

Founder of Twitter

• Born: November 19, 1976
• Place of Birth: St. Louis, Missouri

Primary Company/Organization: Twitter/X

Introduction

Entrepreneur and computer programmer Jack Dorsey is best known as the creator of Twitter (later X), a microblogging tool that uses messages of up to 280 characters to share news and other information with followers. At first disregarded by many as a trivial service for the egotistical, Twitter gained respect as groups and individuals used it as a platform for political, social, and increasingly commercial agendas. Between Twitter and Square, a platform to accept debit or credit card payments via smartphones, Dorsey has helped generate billions in market value.

Early Life

Jack Dorsey was born on November 19, 1976, in St. Louis, Missouri, and grew up in the city, the oldest of three sons born to Tim and Marcia Dorsey. His father was an engineer, and his mother owned a coffee shop in an era before the Starbucks chain. By the time he was eight, Dorsey was fascinated with maps of cities and covered the walls of his small bedroom with maps from magazines and gas stations. A shy, skinny boy, he liked walking through the city, his curiosity excited by all the sights. He was particularly interested in the trains, taxis, and police cars that moved around the city and spent hours with his younger brother Danny videotaping moving trains. When his father brought home the family's first computer, an IBM PC Jr., Jack found another fascination. He could now design his own maps using a graphics program. At fourteen, listening to police and ambulance radio frequencies, he developed an interest in real-time physical information transfer. He taught himself programming, and at fifteen, still a student at Bishop DuBorg High School, he was working as a programmer, writing dispatch software that some taxicab companies would continue to use decades later.

After high school, Dorsey attended the University of Missouri at Rolla (now the Missouri University of Science and Technology) briefly, but he left to write code for a dispatch software company in New York. After another try at college life, this time at New York University, he moved to Oakland, California, and in 2000 started a company that offered his dispatch software through the internet. It was while he was running this company that an idea came to him: combining dispatch software with instant messaging. When he heard that Odeo (a company that enabled the creation, recording, and sharing of podcasts) was hiring programmers, he applied and signed a three-week trial contract. Meanwhile, wanting a backup plan in case programming proved unsatisfying, he enrolled at a fashion class at Apparel Arts, a trade school in San Francisco, and began designing and sewing clothes.

Life's Work

When technology giant Apple incorporated a directory of podcasts into its iTunes program, Odeo had to find a new direction. Odeo cofounder Evan Williams asked his staff for ideas, and Dorsey offered his concept of combining dispatch software with instant messaging. Reactions were mixed, but Dorsey began working on his idea with others. A number of people contributed to the project, then called “twttr,” but agreement that all the work was based on Dorsey's original idea is unanimous. Dorsey sent the first message, or tweet, on March 21, 2006, and four months later, on July 15, Odeo officially launched Twitter for the public. Initially the service did not generate much buzz, but in March 2007, at the South by Southwest (SXSW) music and digital conference in Austin, Texas, thousands of conferees, attracted by Twitter's demonstration display, began tweeting about conference events and the best parties. At the time, Twitter normally carried about twenty thousand messages per day. The figure rose to sixty thousand during the conference.

Williams bought Odeo from its investors, and in late 2006 he, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone, and Dorsey founded Obvious Corporation, a company designed to be a start-up incubator with Twitter as its first project. The next year, Twitter was spun off as a separate company with Dorsey as chief executive officer (CEO). Catapulted from being one of the group to being in charge left Dorsey uneasy. Since many of Twitter's employees had moved from the failed Odeo, morale was low. Dorsey felt that the company belonged to the older, more experienced Williams and was reluctant to advance his own ideas. Pressure was intensified by the speed at which Twitter was growing. By 2008, the company had 5 million users. According to some sources, tension between Dorsey and Williams had increased to the degree that they were hardly speaking to each other. In October, Dorsey was ousted as CEO, and Williams took over. Dorsey remained as company chairman, but he was no longer an employee of Twitter, the company built on a product he had conceived. The normally private Dorsey would eventually admit that his dismissal was painful.

A few months after he left Twitter, Dorsey was in St. Louis visiting his parents for the Christmas holiday. He had a chance encounter with Jim McKelvey, an entrepreneur turned glassblower, for whom a fifteen-year-old Dorsey had written CD-ROM software. Dorsey and McKelvey decided they wanted to work together again. In February 2009, McKelvey called and shared with Dorsey the story of a lost sale. McKelvey had been unable to complete the sale of a $3,000 glass faucet because he could not process credit card payments from his studio. Both Dorsey and McKelvey were using iPhones at the time of the conversation, and Dorsey began wondering whether, with that technology readily available, it would be feasible to process credit cards using a smart phone. Within a month, McKelvey had built a magnetic reader through which cards could be swiped. Dorsey had written the software for the server to process the payments, and Tristan O'Tierney, who wrote the Twinkle application for Tapulous, a Disney subsidiary, wrote the iPhone app. On December 1, 2009, Dorsey tweeted to announce the birth of a new company, Square, Inc., a service that allows any individual or small business to accept payment by credit card using a mobile phone or tablet using a small reader device. Once again, Dorsey was a cofounder and a CEO.

Meanwhile, Twitter continued to grow. US presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain had demonstrated that the service could be an effective campaign tool in 2008, and the presidential election that year showed that the service could also be a weapon against tyranny. Iranian Twitter users tweeted live updates of the thousands protesting the victory claimed by incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after the Iranian government blocked text messaging and satellite feeds of foreign news coverage. By 2010, Twitter had more than 105 million users, who together tweeted some 55 million times a day.

Inside the company, however, the situation was troubled. In October 2010, Williams was replaced as CEO by Dick Costolo, the company's chief operating officer. By his own account, Williams chose to leave, but several other sources say that the board asked him to leave. In March 2011, rumors began to circulate that Dorsey, who had remained chairman of the board, would be resuming a more active role at Twitter. He had privately expressed regret that he had not been part of Twitter's recent growth and dissatisfaction with the company's recent product design and inattention to users' needs. On March 28, CEO Costolo tweeted that Dorsey would return as executive chairman in charge of product development. Dorsey's own tweet added that he would also continue as CEO of Square. On March 29, Williams announced, after a four-month vacation, that he would not be returning to Twitter in a management role. In July 2015, after Dick Costolo stepped down, Dorsey became Twitter's interim CEO, a role that, pending the decision of the company's executive board, many believed he would take on permanently.

Dorsey indeed became Twitter's permanent CEO once again in October 2015. As he reasserted control over the company, he fired approximately 8 percent of its employees as part of an effort to refocus on its core mission and resume growth in the number of active users. Dorsey also pledged to distribute a significant portion of his shares in the company to the remaining staff members. Another initiative was changing the structure of tweets so that images and links did not count against the character limit, allowing users more space. Nevertheless, Twitter continued to struggle with stagnant active user numbers and problems such as accounts controlled by bots. Controversially, Dorsey also remained as CEO at Square, leading some board members in both companies as well as outside analysts to question his ability to successfully divide his time between two major tech endeavors. Over the next several years, Dorsey was named by multiple publications as one of the US's worst CEOs, including placing fourth on Fox Business's Worst CEOs of 2016 list. That same year, Dorsey gave his employees about one-third of his Twitter shares.

In late 2018, President Donald Trump and fellow Republicans accused social media sites, including Twitter, of having a political bias, de-emphasizing Republican accounts in search results, and meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. In September 2018, Dorsey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that Twitter remained impartial, stating that, according to data analysis, there was no significant difference between the number of times a tweet by a Republican member of Congress was viewed versus a tweet by a Democratic member of Congress.

In February 2020, billionaire investor Paul Singer, founder of Elliot Management, urged Twitter to replace Dorsey as CEO, citing his divided attention between Twitter and Square as well as Dorsey's announcement that he wanted to move to Africa while retaining leadership of the two companies. At the time, the companies were each valued at more than $5 billion, and no other chief executive had held more than one company worth that much simultaneously. Elliott Management and Twitter reached an agreement the following month that allowed Dorsey to remain CEO of Twitter and Square.

Dorsey announced his resignation as CEO of Twitter via a tweet on November 29, 2021, saying, "I've decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders." He was replaced by the company's chief technology officer, Parag Agrawal, whom Dorsey endorsed as his successor.

Dorsey, a long-time Bitcoin advocate, made headlines in December 2021 when he tweeted criticisms of Web3, a blockchain-based version of the internet that operates on cryptocurrency. Dorsey said that Web3 was effectively owned by venture capitalists who had invested billions in it. Web3 would therefore never be free from their influence or interests. His concern countered Web3 supporters' claims that it would become a democratizing and decentralizing network.

Also in December 2021, Square legally changed its name to Block. The company said it made the change to reflect Square's expanded range of offerings as well as the growth of its corporate portfolio beyond the Square brand into blockchain technology and other areas. At the time of the name change, the company had already added peer-to-peer digital banking, small business lending, and trading in crypto and stocks to its apps and services. It had also acquired Afterpay, a financing provider, and the music streaming service Tidal. Dorsey was a longtime Bitcoin enthusiast. He began praising the cryptocurrency in 2012.

In an April 2022 Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Block announced that Dorsey's title had changed from CEO to Block Head, at his request, but that his responsibilities at the company remained the same. Media reports on Dorsey's title change noted that it came within a month of—and was similar to—Elon Musk's title change at Tesla, from CEO to Technoking of Tesla. In October 2022, Musk bought Twitter, which he later renamed X. Throughout the sale process, Dorsey gave Musk his endorsement.

Dorsey joined the board of directors of Bluesky Social in February 2022. This social networking app and platform, which he helped to launch at Twitter, was similar to Twitter but decentralized. It eventually was spun off as an independent project. Dorsey stepped down from the board of Twitter in May 2022. On May 5, 2024, he announced he had left Bluesky. He urged his followers to continue to use Twitter/X. A day earlier, Dorsey had announced he had donated $5 million through his #startsmall charity to social network Nostr.

Personal Life

Dorsey is often viewed as a paradox. A billionaire, he gave away the software he wrote as shareware for years. He announced in 2020, during the COVID-19 global pandemic, that he would donate $1 billion to causes including COVID-19 relief. By 2024, he had given away $635 million. Dorsey's estimated net worth, which peaked in 2021 at $12.5 billion, was about $4.4 billion in October 2024.

He became known for spending a great deal of time walking in a fourteen-block area of San Francisco in which his loft apartment and offices at Square and Twitter were located. He said that walking was an excellent opportunity for thinking.

Bibliography

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