Jack Dorsey

Jack Patrick Dorsey (born November 19, 1976) is an American Internet entrepreneur, philanthropist, and programmer, who is a co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, Inc., as well as co-founder, principal executive officer and chairperson of Block, Inc., which is the developer of the Square financial services platform.

He is also on the board of directors of Bluesky Social.

As of October 2023, Forbes estimated his net worth to be $3.1 billion.

Dorsey was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri.

His father is Tim Dorsey and his mother is Marcia (née Smith) Dorsey.

Jack Dorsey is partly of Italian descent on his mother's side.

His father worked for a company that developed mass spectrometers and his mother was a homemaker.

He was raised Catholic, and his uncle is a Catholic priest in Cincinnati.

Dorsey attended Bishop DuBourg High School.

In his younger days, he worked occasionally as a fashion model.

By age 14, he had become interested in dispatch routing.

Dorsey enrolled at the University of Missouri–Rolla in 1995 and attended for two-plus years before transferring to New York University in 1997, but he dropped out two years later, one semester short of graduating.

He came up with the idea that eventually became Twitter while studying at New York University.

While working on dispatching as a programmer, Dorsey moved to California.

In 2000, Dorsey started his company in Oakland to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the Web.

His other projects and ideas at this time included networks of medical devices and a "frictionless service market".

In July 2000, building on dispatching and inspired in part by LiveJournal and by AOL Instant Messenger, he had the idea for a Web-based realtime status/short message communication service.

When he first saw implementations of instant messaging, Dorsey wondered whether the software's user status output could be shared easily among friends.

He approached Odeo, which at the time happened to be interested in text messaging.

Dorsey and Biz Stone decided that SMS text suited the status-message idea, and built a prototype of Twitter in about two weeks.

The idea attracted many users at Odeo and investment from Evan Williams, a co-founder of that firm in 2005 who had left Google after selling Pyra Labs and Blogger.

Noah Glass, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone co-founded Odeo, later renamed Obvious Corporation, which then spun off Twitter, Inc. Dorsey became Twitter's Chief Executive Officer (CEO).

As CEO, Dorsey saw the startup through two rounds of funding by venture capitalists.

He reportedly lost his position for leaving work early to enjoy other pursuits, such as yoga and fashion design.

As the service began to grow in popularity, Dorsey chose the improvement of uptime as top priority, even over creating revenue—which, as of 2008, Twitter was not designed to earn.

Dorsey described the commercial use of Twitter and its API as two things that could lead to paid features.

His three guiding principles, which he says the company shares, are simplicity, constraint, and craftsmanship.

On October 16, 2008, Williams took over as CEO, while Dorsey became chairman of the board.

During his time as chairman, Dorsey joined several State Department delegations, including a trip to Iraq in April 2009, led by Jared Cohen.

In November, when Iranians took to the streets in the Green Revolution, Twitter was scheduled to conduct maintenance of its site, which would entail temporarily shutting down Twitter's servers.

Dorsey responded to a request from Cohen to delay the maintenance so that it would not affect the revolution in Iran, because Iranians were using Twitter to communicate and coordinate.

Since President Obama had announced that there would be no meddling in Iran, the move sparked controversy.

In February 2010, Dorsey was part of another State Department delegation, this time to Russia.

On March 28, 2011, he returned to Twitter as executive chairman after Dick Costolo replaced Williams as CEO.

This was an attempt to entice new users, since the number of tweets per day had dropped from about 500 million in September 2013 and its peak of 661 million in August 2014 to about 300 million in January 2016.

On June 10, 2015, Costolo announced his resignation as CEO, effective July 1, 2015.

Dorsey assumed the post of interim CEO upon Costolo's departure.

He was named permanent CEO on October 5, 2015.

In May 2016, Dorsey announced that Twitter would not count photos and links in the 140-character limit to free up more space for text.

On November 22, 2016, Dorsey was briefly suspended from his own Twitter account with 3.9 million followers.