Jack Dorsey Has Resigned From Twitter

Chris Williams

Nov. 29, 2021

Dorsey oversaw several moves to embrace Bitcoin and crypto technology at large during his tenure at the helm of Twitter.

Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

“This was my decision,” Dorsey said in a note to his co-workers.

Jack Dorsey Steps Down as Twitter CEO

Jack Dorsey is leaving Twitter.

The Big Tech entrepreneur tweeted out an email announcing his resignation to the company Monday. The message read:

“After almost 16 years of having a role at our company… from co-founder to CEO to Chair to Exec Chair to interim-CEO to CEO… I decided it’s finally time for me to leave… I want you all to know that this was my decision and I own it.”

not sure anyone has heard but,

I resigned from Twitter pic.twitter.com/G5tUkSSxkl

— jack (@jack) November 29, 2021

The email revealed that Twitter’s CTO, Parag Agrawal, would step in as CEO commencing today. Bret Taylor, meanwhile, will take on the role of Board Chair. Dorsey said that he would temporarily remain on the board to help the pair with the transition, but would then leave the company altogether. Dorsey explained his decision by stating that he believes that it’s important for companies to evolve without their founding team, as founders can act as “a single point of failure.”

Besides Twitter, Dorsey is known for his strong belief in Bitcoin, which he imagines as the “Internet’s native currency.” His other company, Square, has invested in the asset and supports Bitcoin payments via Cash App. Twitter also took several big steps to support the technology under Dorsey’s leadership, from adding Bitcoin tipping on the Lightning Network to minting its own NFTs (Dorsey also sold his first tweet on the site as an NFT, despite his apparent lack of interest in Ethereum). Earlier this month, it was revealed that Twitter had hired Tess Rinearson, a former Cosmos contributor, in a bid to start integrating Web3 applications.

More recently, Dorsey has been working on a Bitcoin-focused project called tbDEX. Built through Square, the project is promising to bring a decentralized exchange, otherwise known as a DEX, to Bitcoin. Square published the whitepaper for tbDEX earlier this month, though it’s unclear if the plans for the platform had anything to do with Dorsey’s decision to step away from Twitter.

The market reacted badly to the news of Dorsey’s departure, with TWTR trading at $46.58 at press time. It’s down 0.96% today.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this feature owned ETH, ATOM, and several other cryptocurrencies.

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