Photo: Joe Raedle (Getty Images)
Jack has resigned.
This morning, the Twitter founder and CEO tweeted a company-wide email obliquely explaining that the company has become too “founder-ied,” which he believes is “severely limiting” Twitter. Why? Who knows. This is the Tom Bombadil of CEOs.
He says he’s handing the reigns to Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal, who starts as CEO today.
Dorsey plans to resign from the board in May in order to “give Parag the space he needs to lead” and because “it’s critical a company can stand on its own, free of its founder’s influence or direction.” By that logic, he would need to step down from Square (a company he founded) as well.
The news leaked this morning to CNBC, with no additional information. You’ve got to hand it to the man. Whatever goes on at Twitter, Jack’s kept his plans tight.
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In 2019, Dorsey announced plans to spend six months traveling through Africa and presumably evangelizing cryptocurrency. (“Africa will define the future (especially the bitcoin one!)” he tweeted.) Dorsey also serves as CEO of Square. In early 2020, billionaire Twitter board member Paul Singer called for his resignation due to his split focus between those ventures.
Twitter shares briefly bumped 11 percent following the news, and trading was quickly halted due to volatility.
Jack first served as Twitter CEO in 2007 and was reportedly forced out a year later because, among other reasons, he spent too much time focusing on fashion design. He returned to Twitter in 2011 as Twitter executive chair, got rich from the IPO, and returned to the CEO role in 2015.
Dorsey’s kept things slow and steady, which historically infuriated everyone nearly as much as Zuckerburg’s more overt wreckage. By the time his inscrutable speak-softly approach permitted near-nuclear annihilation, he graded his performance a “C.” He rarely offered sentences that made sense.
But when Twitter finally budged, it budged. Twitter baned political ads and added increasingly conspicuous fact-check labels and (granted, after an armed insurrection) banned Donald Trump.
In the end, Twitter caused a massive headache and got his ass dragged to a Congressional hearing. Bitcoin conferences seem preferable.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
