Jack Dorsey, president of Twitter, is leaving his position.
Jack Dorsey, president of Twitter, is leaving his position.
'I have decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to continue without its founders,' Dorsey said in a statement after several hours of speculation.
Twitter announced Monday the departure of its top executive and founder, Jack Dorsey, who will be replaced by its current chief technology officer, Parag Agrawal.
"I have decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to continue without its founders," Dorsey said in a statement after several hours of speculation that generated notable stock market movements.
Dorsey's farewell closes his second cycle as CEO at the social network, at a time when Twitter is making headlines for its renewed pace of product launches after years of criticism that it had fallen behind rivals like Facebook Inc and new social networks like TikTok in innovation. Dorsey is now leaving because he feels confident with his successor and will focus on his payments processing firm Square Inc and other initiatives such as philanthropy, a source familiar with Reuters's situation. The source said the company's board had been preparing for Dorsey's farewell since last year.
In recent months, Dorsey and Twitter's movements have revolved around cryptocurrencies. Last September, he announced that Twitter was already accepting bitcoin tips and anticipated that they were already working on adopting NFTs on their social network. In March of this year, Dorsey himself put the NFT of his first tweet, published in 2006, up for sale. Another of the projects Dorsey has been working on in recent years is the idea of a decentralized social network. To this end, he decided to lead the creation of Bluesky, a new standard for decentralized networks where the user chooses the algorithm that recommends the content.
Elliott Management, a major Twitter investor, tried in 2020 to force Dorsey to leave his position as CEO, mainly due to his dual role and doubts about the platform's performance to grow. But, as described from CNBC, the board of directors would already have a candidate to replace him.
The departure comes six years after Dorsey returned to the CEO role to help turn around the social network's business. During Dorsey's tenure, Twitter achieved profitability, posted its first $1 billion quarter, and began testing and launching a wide range of features to engage users. But Twitter, like its peers, has also faced the challenge of content moderation and increasing scrutiny from lawmakers and the public.
CNBC was the first to report Dorsey's planned departure on Monday. Twitter shares rose as much as 10% in premarket trading Monday after the report before giving up some of those gains.
The news comes as Twitter has accelerated the pace of product innovation over the past year to compete with social networking rivals such as Facebook Inc and TikTok and meet its goal of doubling annual revenue by 2023. Twitter was not immediately available for comment on the situation. The Nasdaq index suspended Twitter's trading shortly after the opening of trading on Wall Street, where shares soared 10 percent in premarket trading in anticipation of the news.
In his last tweet, written on Nov. 28, Dorsey wrote, "I love Twitter." The "likes" to that tweet exceeded 54,000 on Monday. Financial news channel CNBC was the first to report on Dorsey's departure. Earlier in 2020, Dorsey faced calls from Elliott Management Corp to resign after the hedge fund argued he was paying too little attention to Twitter while also running payment processing company Square Inc. Dorsey fended off this pressure by giving Elliott and its ally, acquisition firm Silver Lake Partners, seats on Twitter's board.