The Life of Jack Dorsey: Former CEO of Twitter and Bitcoin Enthusiast

Jack Dorsey Biography

Early Life of Jack Dorsey

Jack Dorsey spent his childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, being born to Tim Dorsey, who is an employee in a spectrometers company and Marcia, a homemaker. Dorsey attended Bishop DuBourg High School and occasionally worked as a fashion model when he was young.

After studying at the University of Missouri-Rolla, Dorsey was transferred to New York University. However, he dropped out of his course one semester short of graduating. Being interested in dispatch routing from the beginning, he started a company in Oakland that provides dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the web.

While working in dispatching, he was inspired by AOL Instant Messenger, and wondered if he could develop a similar short message social platform and approached others who have similar interests. Dorsey along with Biz Stone and Evan Williams finally cofounded Twitter (currently X) in around 2 weeks.

Career Journey of Jack Dorsey

Twitter 

When Twitter was founded, Dorsey along with his cofounders reportedly bought the domain name for $7,000 in 2006. After working as a CEO for sometime, Dorsey lost his position for spending less time at work and more time on his other pursuits like yoga and fashion design.

However, Jack Dorsey continued to be part of twitter in different roles and at the same time he also built a startup called Square, which allows business owners to accept credit card payments through smartphones. At that time, the world limit of Twitter was just 140 characters.

Eventually, Twitter became a popular social media platform known for its brevity. According to Jack Dorsey, the three guiding principles of Twitter are simplicity, constraint, and craftsmanship. When Twitter went public on the New York Stock Exchange, Jack Dorsey became a billionaire and popular figure in the tech industry.

After serving Twitter for several years, Dorsey finally left his CEO position in 2021 and handed over its responsibilities to former CTO Parag Agarwal. In May 2022, he completely left the board of directors but retained 2.4% of his Twitter stock when Elon Musk acquired the company.

Block

Initially, Block Inc. was called Square Inc., which was developed by Jack Dorsey when he first lost his CEO position at Twitter. Square allowed small business owners to accept credit card payments through mobile devices. The company enables it by attaching a small card reader to mobile phones. It also sends electronic receipts through text messages or email.

Square gradually grew from having 10 employees in 2009 to more than 100 employees in 2011. As the CEO of the company, Dorsey owned 24.4% of it when it went public on NYSE in 2015. The company developed a mobile payment service application, Cash App to enable easy payment transfers.

Dorsey announced to rebrand Square to Block in 2021 because of his interest in developing blockchain-related payment services involving Bitcoin’s lightning network. He believes cryptocurrency, especially Bitcoin, is the future of currency and is working toward the same. However, the ticker of Block remained SQ.

Apart from Twitter and Block, Jack Dorsey is the co-founder of a decentralized social networking platform, Bluesky Social and started beta testing the platform last year. Dorsey is also a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company and Berggruen Institute, a Los Angeles-based think tank.

Jack Dorsey’s Personal Life

Jack Dorsey starts his mornings with meditation. He also completed ten days of meditation called Vipassana and even went on a birthday Vipassana meditation trip in 2018. When he talked about his eating habits like having one meal a day and fasting all weekend in 2019, he faced criticism.

Dorsey was also involved in politics of the United States several times. Very recently in June 2023, he supported Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to become the Democratic party nominee in the 2024 United States presidential election.

Jack Dorsey is one of the most eligible bachelors in the tech industry. He is not known to be married but spotted several times with his girlfriends in public. He dated Ravel Lyn, Kate Greer, Lily Cole, and Nicole Lapin at different time periods.

Jack Dorsey’s Net Worth and Philanthropy

The net worth of Jack Dorsey in 2023 is around $5 billion. A large portion of his wealth came from his ownership stock of Block Inc. company.

Dorsey’s philanthropic activities include donating funds to around 600 Missouri public school projects, and donating $350,000 to a non-profit project, TeamTrees. When the Pandemic hit, Dorsey donated $15 million to support India and moved $1 billion worth of his equity in Square to support relief programs during the same period.