Jack Dorsey; A Bohemian Who Ended Up a Billionaire by Mistake
Jack Dorsey; A Bohemian Who Ended Up a Billionaire by Mistake by Quinn Dixsept
Jack Dorsey, A Bohemian Who Ended up a Billionaire by Mistake.
Jack Dorsey was born in St. Louis Missouri to Tim, an engineer and Marcia, a homemaker. He attended New York University but dropped out 1 semester short of graduating.
No one expected Dorsey to amount to anything, he was a “semi homeless hippie that couch surfed”. He dabbled in fashion design, became a licensed masseur but his real fascination was computer programming.
At the age of 15, Dorsey developed a dispatch software that could coordinate communication between fleets of vehicles such as taxis and deliver trucks.
After dropping out of college, Dorsey moved to Oakland, California, in 2000, he started a company offering his dispatch software through the internet. Shortly after starting his company, Dorsey came up with the idea for a site that would combine the broad reach of dispatch software with the ease of instant messaging.
Dorsey needed help in accomplishing this so he approached Odeo, owned by Evan Williams and Noah Glass. (See my article on Noah Glass Twitter’s forgotten founder). Odeo was a software company that enabled users to create, record, and share podcasts.
Noah and Jack worked endless hours combining their ideas, and it was Noah that wrote the program and came up with the name of the company that would become Twitter.
Jack was very protective of his idea and felt that Noah Glass was becoming too controlling and obsessed so Jack told Evan Williams he would quit if Evan didn’t get rid of Noah Glass.
After Jack and Evan ousted Noah Glass and brought in Biz Stone, Dorsey, Stone, and Williams became the face of Twitter.
Jack originally served as CEO for the first 18 months of Twitter’s existence, from April 2007 until October 2008. Jack lost his position because he would leave work early to enjoy other pursuits, such as fashion design and yoga. He wasn’t prepared for what Twitter was becoming and it caused him a lot of stress. He was replaced by Evan Williams, one of his co founders.
Twitter was initially mocked by some as a tool for the shallow and self-centered, rightly so and it probably contributed to the swath of narcissistic personalities we see today.
Late-night comedy host Conan O’Brien even featured a segment called "Twitter Tracker" that mocked users of the service. In its early days, the site also suffered from frequent service outages.
Eventually celebrities and CEOs alike began tweeting and Twitter was no longer the brunt of so many jokes. Suddenly the head of the "microblogging" movement, Twitter became a powerful platform for U.S. Presidential candidates in 2008, Obama and McCain, as a method for updating their supporters while on the campaign trail.
Twitter rose to international prominence after the June 2009 presidential elections in Iran, when thousands of opposition supporters took to the streets to protest the “claimed victory” of incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. When the Iranian government blocked text messaging and satellite feeds of foreign news coverage, Iranian Twitter users flooded the site with live updates. A U.S. State Department official emailed Dorsey to request that Twitter delay its scheduled maintenance so that protestors could keep tweeting. "It appears Twitter is playing an important role at a crucial time in Iran. Could you keep it going?" said a State Department spokesman, describing the call. Twitter complied. Is this when the overlords realized the power of Twitter and began seizing control?
In 2010, Jack became an investor in the social networking company Foursquare and launched a new venture, Square, which allowed people to receive credit card payments through a tiny device plugged in to their mobile phone or computer. Dang that’s a good idea I wish I’d thought of it.
Square filed for an IPO in October 2015, and became a publicly traded company the following month. Square would eventually be changed to Block. Cha-ching!
In 2015 Jack returned to Twitter, first as an interim CEO and then became it’s permanent CEO. Shortly afterward, he announced that the company would be cutting about eight percent of its workforce.
This move was "part of an overall plan to organize around the company's top product priorities and drive efficiencies throughout the company," according to a securities filing by Twitter reported in the Los Angeles Times.
In September of 2018 Dorsey was called to speak to congress, “After Twitter played an outsize role in driving the conversation around the 2016 U.S. presidential election” to discuss the platform's methods for countering fake accounts and address accusations of political favoritism.
"We believe strongly in being impartial, and we strive to enforce our rules impartially," the CEO said in his prepared testimony. "In fact, from a simple business perspective and to serve the public conversation, Twitter is incentivized to keep all voices on the platform."
I believe the overlords were panicked over Twitter’s power when President Donald Trump and his digital soldiers, used twitter so effectively during the 2016 Presidential election. This is when the first crackdowns started happening which prompted President Trump to summon Dorsey to the White House the following spring to discuss concerns about his followers being removed.
In May of 2020 the site added “fact-checking” links to two posts in which President Trump accurately claimed that mail-in voting would lead to widespread fraud and it did, he was right again. The President responded by threatening to "strongly regulate" or shut down social media platforms” Trump enacted an Executive order called Communications Decency Act.
“My executive order calls for new regulations under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to make it so that social media companies that engage in censoring any political conduct will not be able to keep their liability shield," the president said.
The Cheater in Chief Byedumb revoked this EO as one of his first acts as resident. Could this be why a judge was able to dismiss Trump’s lawsuit against Twitter?
After receiving the reeeeeing cries of spoiled brat do gooders, Dorsey tried to pacify them by expanding his philanthropic efforts. Dorsey contributed to the #TeamTrees climate change initiative in October 2019 by funding the planting of 150,000 trees.
In April 2020, Dorsey announced that he was donating $1 billion worth of equity in Square to support coronavirus relief efforts around the world. None of this did any good of course because if you give an inch to these sycophants they demand your soul which is eventually what Dorsey gave them.
Until 2021, Dorsey tried to bypass the overlords by applying "world leader" exceptions that enabled President Trump to post content on Twitter that normally would cause the overlords to remove or generate sanctions per the overlord’s platform rules. However the pressure from the DS prompted Twitter in May of 2020, to add warnings to some of Trump's tweets and from Election Day in November 2020, more flaggings were applied to his tweets. The DS was in full panic mode and not even trying to hide it.
All of this became too much for Dorsey so on November 29, 2021 Dorsey announced he would step down from his role as CEO, effective immediately, Dorsey remained as a member of Twitter's board and Parag Agrawal, Twitter's chief technology officer, took over as CEO.
Jack’s statement;
"I've decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders. “ "My trust in Parag as Twitter's CEO is deep. His work over the past 10 years has been transformational. I'm deeply grateful for his skill, heart, and soul. It's his time to lead."
In an internal note, Dorsey said: "I want you all to know that this was my decision and I own it. It was a tough one for me, of course. I love this service and company ... and all of you so much. I'm really sad ... yet really happy. There aren't many companies that get to this level. And there aren't many founders that choose their company over their own ego. I know we'll prove this was the right move."
Just my opinion but I believe what was coming next prompted Dorsey’s decision to step down.
The DS had their claws deep into Twitter now and Dorsey didn’t have the desire to be in charge of the upcoming mess. I believe the pressure he was under was unbearable and to preserve his sanity he decided to tip toe away.
On January 6, 2021, after the DS staged a fake insurrection, Twitter applied a 12-hour timeout to Trump's account for violating its Civic Integrity policy. A made up term that goes against our constitutional rights.
On January 8, 2021 Trump's account was suspended permanently which was one of the goals of their fake insurrection. They wanted Trump and his digital soldiers removed because our effectiveness was extremely successful.
Dorsey stated via twitter “I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban @realDonaldTrump from Twitter, or how we got here”. He added that the decision was made "with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter, "banning Trump sets a precedent I feel is dangerous."
Conclusion
When I started this article I was prepared to rip Dorsey for his treatment of cofounder Noah Glass and his banning of President Trump. After reading 20 plus articles about him I came to realize that Dorsey is just a bohemian hippie who wanted to earn a living doing what he loves, computer programming. He never expected Twitter to blow up and become the bullhorn for the masses and heads of state.
In April of 2022, Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk. Jack tweeted the following;
@jack
Apr 29, 2022
“I have tried taking a break from Twitter recently, but I must say: the company has always tried to do its best given the information it had. Every decision we made was ultimately my responsibility*. In the cases we were wrong or went too far, we admitted it and worked to correct.”
“Nothing that is said now matters. What matters is how the service works and acts, and how quickly it learns and improves. My biggest failing was that quickness part. I’m confident that part at least is being addressed, and will be fixed.”
Dorsey added that it’s “crazy and wrong” that “individuals or companies bear this responsibility,” in an apparent reference to past unpopular decisions. (Banning Trump) “I don’t believe any permanent ban (with the exception of illegal activity) is right, or should be possible. This is why we need a protocol that’s resilient to the layers above.”
Twitter board has stated they have no plans to reinstate President Trump and Trump himself has said no thanks if they do.
Perhaps under Musks’ leadership Twitter will finally become the site Jack and his fellow cofounders dreamed of when they began this journey.
*Incredible, literally 1 hour after I wrote this last sentence Musk said he would reverse President Trump’s ban from Twitter adding that the ban was “morally wrong” “foolish in the extreme” and “flat out stupid”.
@jack responded with this tweet; “I do agree. There are exceptions (CSE, illegal behavior, spam or network manipulation, etc.), but generally permanent bans are a failure of ours and don’t work, which I wrote about here after the event (and called for a resilient social media protocol).”
Love this article Quinn! I wasn’t a Dorsey fan either until I rabbit holed and found out he wasn’t controlling Twitter at all. Your article reinforces my view and I think Dorsey is going to redeem himself in a huge way.
Great substack… love reading all the substack you all are putting out… can’t wait for the next one!