It was Jack Dorsey gloomy. It was 2009 and we were in Baghdad, among a group of State Department’s Silicon Valley movers and shakers to visit companies, universities and the eerily deserted National Museum of Iraq. But at home, all the movement and trembling in the company he had invented — a short-form blogging platform called Twitter — happened without him. Twitter began to develop, but Dorsey was fired from his leadership role, and its co-founders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, made public victory tours, appearing on talk shows and conferences. Dorsey, a man whose emotions are deep, was in trouble, as he admitted to me during a discussion late at night. The situation still stung me when I met him a few months later, when he took me to his apartment to show me his new idea, an acorn-shaped little boyfriend who could turn your phone into a credit card tool.
Revenge is said to be a dish best served cold, but over the next few years Jack Dorsey was presented with a sumptuous meal served not only hot but probably vegan. Or maybe keto. Not only did this strange app become Square – now valued at nearly $ 100 billion – but in 2011, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, who replaced Williams, chose Dorsey as the company’s part-time product guru. Four years later, Dorsey stepped in to replace Costolo to become the Twitter leader again. The man who invented the service and changed the world by giving everyone an immediate voice, for better or worse, was finally back in charge of his creation.
Can one person run two large public companies? Dorsey insisted he could. After all, his idol Steve Jobs didn’t run Apple and Pixar?
The key would be to assemble a team to bring the company to glory with a part-time manager. With Square, Dorsey apparently did, but the Twitter post was mixed. It is a constant disappointment that consumers have never reached the billions that have marked the ceilings of other social networks. The fact that the company exceeds its weight in terms of influence has always raised the question: Why doesn’t Twitter weigh more? The company has gone through an endless stream of Svengalis products, official and others.
Regarding the Twitter content management department, Dorsey was the Silicon Valley Hamlet, acknowledging the problems but hesitating to take the harsh measures needed to address them. Any woman who publishes something even slightly contradictory should expect a blizzard of horrifying misogynistic answers. Only relatively recently has Twitter offered serious answers to its troll problem. And while Donald Trump is a problem that no one has figured out how to deal with, Dorsey has allowed the chief misinformer to use Twitter as his metropolis for too long. (On the other hand, Dorsey’s call for a final ban on Trump after Jan. 6 was bolder than Facebook’s timid “termination”.)
In other respects, Dorsey quite admirably broke the unspoken rules about how the CEO should behave. Oddities abound in corporate apartments, but they rarely show up so brazenly. There was his diet. His beard. His nose ring. And his obsession: denim, moving, and more recently crypto.