Fifteen years ago, Jack Dorsey told the world (well, not that many people at the time) that he was “just setting up my twttr”). With that first-ever tweet, Dorsey, then a 29-year-old budding entrepreneur, set in motion a service that now has an estimated 400 million users worldwide and a market cap of $46 billion.
Monday, Dorsey stepped down as CEO of Twitter, saying in a statement, “I’ve decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders.” As of now, Dorsey remains CEO of payments platform Square, which he also co-founded.
Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s CTO, will step into the CEO role. Dorsey will remain on Twitter’s board until his term expires at the 2022 shareholders’ meeting, with Salesforce president and COO Bret Taylor taking over as chairman of the board.
Dorsey’s current tenure as CEO began six years ago, and since then Twitter’s stock is up 85%. The microblog platform most famously bore loud proclamations from candidate and then President Donald Trump before banning Trump from the platform in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
The tech landscape has seen other dramatic shifts in the past 15 years, illustrated by Dorsey’s sale of that first tweet for $2.9 million in March as an NFT (he donated the money to charity). Another development that has shaken up the tech space was the rise of cryptocurrency, a passion of Dorsey’s.
“If I were not at Square or Twitter, I’d be working on Bitcoin,” he said at the Bitcoin 2021 conference in June. Square has focused on crypto more over the past year, leading to speculation that Dorsey will pursue more avenues in decentralization and finance in his post-Twitter career.
Dorsey, who has 5.9 million followers on Twitter, has a very simple profile, containing only one interest: #bitcoin.
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