Jack Dorsey: Twitter co-founder makes move against Musk – 5/6/2023 – Tech

If there was ever a moment when Jack Dorsey first transformed from Jesus to Judas in the minds of many former Twitter employees, it was when he described Elon Musk as the “singular solution” to taking over the social networking platform he co-founded. “I trust in your mission to broaden the light of consciousness,” Dorsey posted last April on the site.

Those effusive statements were the culmination of a years-long “bromance” between the two Silicon Valley billionaires that dramatically changed Twitter’s future. Dorsey, according to court documents and people familiar with the matter, was instrumental in arranging the $44 billion sale of the platform to Musk, who has since laid off 90% of his workforce and drastically relaxed his moderation policies.

Now, that alliance appears to have come to an end.

This week, Dorsey publicly spoke out against Musk, saying he didn’t believe the Tesla boss “got it right” in running Twitter. “Everything went wrong,” wrote the 46-year-old, who upped his ante when Musk took Twitter private, making him one of his biggest shareholders. “But it happened, and all we can do now is build something to prevent it from happening again.”

Indeed, Dorsey — whose guru persona has already earned him devotees within Twitter — has been leading the charge to create alternatives to him. Last week, the Twitter-like Bluesky, which Dorsey founded in 2019 while he was still at the helm of Twitter, made headlines for attracting lots of journalists, alongside some politicians and celebrities. He remains on his board and made his comments about Musk on the platform.

On Thursday, Dorsey donated $5 million to “promote the new and growing… ecosystem” of Nostr, another decentralized social networking project, after giving away 14 bitcoins, worth more than $200 thousand, to its founder in December.

Those close to Dorsey say Nostr has been his main focus lately. Renowned for his long gray beard and penchant for personal wellness fads, Dorsey attended a Nostr conference in March at a yoga retreat in Costa Rica, and spoke at the end giving his blessing to the initiative. “This is his ‘mea culpa’ – this is him taking responsibility for what Twitter has turned out to be,” said Greg Kidd, one of Twitter’s early investors, who also attended.

Dorsey lamented Twitter’s reliance on advertisers and investors and how that forced the platform to try to increase engagement to hit quarterly results, Kidd said. “The second time around, maybe he won’t repeat those mistakes… Jack is getting back to his basic job.”

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Dorsey, who is also a professional massage therapist, helped start Twitter in 2006. He has had two stints as chief executive, most recently from 2015 to late 2021. People close to him say he has always been driven by desire. to democratize and decentralize services. In the case of Twitter, he tried to democratize the media. In recent years, he has also become obsessed with bitcoins and decentralized payments.

This approach spilled over into the way Dorsey ran Twitter. Whenever he had to make a decision, he said he saw it as the company’s “flaw,” preferring to let the employees brainstorm ideas themselves. But it was this lack of a firm hand and the resulting indecisiveness, critics argue, that left Twitter hobbled by slow innovation, briefly challenged by activist investor group Elliott Management, and ultimately vulnerable to Musk. “He believes, for better or for worse, in the wisdom of the collective mind,” Kidd said.

In the meantime, the man who made millions from the site’s IPO has also turned against Wall Street itself, arguing that Twitter should never have been a company answerable to profit-hungry shareholders, but a “protocol” owned by no one company or state.

By the time he stepped down, employees and even board members felt that Dorsey had become an “absent owner” who had already given up on caring about the platform. But his biggest betrayal, according to many former employees, was that he paved the way for Musk’s takeover and publicly criticized the board as inadequate without taking responsibility for his own role.

According to its supporters, it is only natural that Dorsey, a believer in free speech, is now focused on developing the decentralized social networking models of Bluesky and Nostr, whose aim is to build an interoperable system where no central authority is in control.

“A lot of people feel that the amount of money he pushed for Elon to take over … messed up his legitimacy,” said Evan Henshaw-Plath, an acquaintance and former colleague of Dorsey, adding that he thought that criticism was unfair. Now, however, Henshaw-Plath says, “I think there’s a certain desire to financially activate these alternatives, as an aggressive response to both Wall Street and Elon Musk.”

For Twitter 1.0 employees, who felt deeply betrayed by Dorsey, Musk’s recent criticism was slow to come. Some hope their former acolytes will return in time. “I think 1.0 has a short memory and will move forward quickly once it gets new jobs,” said a former senior Twitter employee. “And you’ll come back to taste it.”

But for Dorsey to salvage his reputation as a social media entrepreneur, a lot depends on whether his new initiatives gain traction or are just another fad. A current Twitter employee said: “Time will tell if this is yet another one of Jack’s great ideas that is never properly delivered before he moves on to the next brilliant thing.”

_{Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves}