Square & Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey: A Short Biography

taketonews

• “Dispatch Management Services” hacked, Dorsey gets job

• While looking for a job, Dorsey, Stone and Williams develop Twitter
• Dorsey gives up CEO posts on Twitter

Born in 1976 in St. Louis, Missouri, the success story began Jack Dorsey with the first programming attempts on a Macintosh, today he is one of the richest people in the world: Jack Dorsey is an American software developer and founder of the messaging platform Twitter, which is now owned by Tesla boss Elon Musk was bought, as well as the mobile payment service Square, which is now known as Block.

As a 17-year-old, he hacked the world’s largest dispatch company

After high school, Dorsey went to Missouri University of Science and Technology to major in engineering and hacked the world’s largest dispatch company, Dispatch Management Services, in Manhattan. He informed the head of the company, Greg Kidd, about the vulnerability and was then hired by the company as a programmer, he broke off his studies. The collaboration with Kidd apparently worked so well that the two went to Oakland together in the course of founding their own software company in 2000. During this time Dorsey probably also developed the first prototype of a messaging platform. In 2005 he relocated from Oakland to a podcast company called Odeo – where he met future Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams.

2006: The birth of Twitter

The Odeo company closed in 2006 – then Dorsey came back to his messaging idea and founded Twitter together with Stone and Williams and Noah Glass in the same year: Dorsey tweeted the first time with the words “just setting up my twttr”.

In 2007, Jack Dorsey became CEO of the company for the first time, although he was fired from that post in 2008 due to his work performance and habit of leaving work very early. William’s famous words to him were, “You can either be a fashion designer or the CEO of Twitter. You can’t be both.”

2023: 591st place among billionaires worldwide

Dorsey retired and founded mobile payment service Square, but returned to Twitter in 2011. After becoming CEO of the messaging platform again in 2015, like Elon Musk, he was one of the few top managers to run two large tech companies simultaneously, Tesla and SpaceX, and he did so successfully: when Twitter went public in 2013, Jack Dorsey become a billionaire in no time. According to Forbes, his fortune is still around 4.2 billion US dollars today, which meant 591st place in the Forbes billionaire ranking in 2023.

Jack Dorsey is known for living an extraordinary and luxurious life, but he’s not shy about making donations either: In 2020, for example, he invested $1 billion to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

Final resignation as Twitter CEO

In late November 2021, Dorsey announced that he was leaving the post as Twitter CEO. One tweet read, “I don’t know if anyone has heard, but I’ve resigned from Twitter.” Also attached to the post is an image of an email in which he explains that the time has come to vacate the post and who will be his successor. The new CEO of Twitter was the former head of technology Parag Agrawal. Dorsey has long been criticized by investors for being a dual CEO. The attached email said of his decision: “I want you to know it was my decision and I stand by it. […] I’m really sad, and yet really happy.”

Twitter takeover by Elon Musk

What Dorsey certainly didn’t know at the time was that Elon Musk was toying with the idea of ​​taking over the microblogging service. After Musk bought a large batch of Twitter shares in April 2022 and briefly considered a hostile takeover, Twitter and the multi-billionaire finally came to an agreement and, after some back and forth, Musk ultimately took over the tech group in October 2022 for US$ 44 billion -dollar and took it off the stock market at the same time. After Musk initially acted as Twitter CEO himself, Linda Yaccarino has now been appointed as the new boss.

Square becomes block

With the takeover by Musk, Dorsey is likely to have severed his last connection to the tech giant he co-founded. After his departure, Dorsey continued to focus on his second venture to grow financial services firm Square into a blockchain company. This also included a name change for the company.

The 2D square becomes a 3D block, both in terms of figures and names. Overall, the Block brand name represents four affiliates: Square, Cash App, Tidal, and TBD54566975.

Bluesky positions itself as a Twitter rival

The latest project in which the tech specialist is involved and on whose board he is a member shows that Dorsey was not indifferent to Musk’s takeover of Twitter: the social network Bluesky, which positions itself as a decentralized and open Twitter alternative. The sticking point of Bluesky is the AT protocol, on which the social medium is built and which should offer users full transparency. Dorsey initiated the project back in 2019. He himself chose the current boss Jay Graber to manage the company, which was founded in 2021.

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