WASHINGTON —Twitter co-founder
Jack Dorsey resigned
Monday as the social media network's CEO, after surviving an activist
investor's bid to oust him in 2020 and steering the firm during the tumult of
Donald Trump's presidency.
اضافة اعلان
Dorsey — who also is chief executive of payments company
Square — confronted during his tenure thorny freedom of speech issues, ways to
make the platform profitable and pressure he had spread himself too thin.
With his recognizable look — shaved head and long beard, and
his atypical style — Dorsey for years has embodied Twitter alone.
"There's a lot of talk about the importance of a
company being 'founder led.' Ultimately I believe that's severely limiting and
a single point of failure," he wrote in an email to Twitter staff.
"I want you all to know that this was my decision and I
own it. It was a tough one for me, of course," he added.
The company said Twitter's chief technical officer Parag
Agrawal will replace Dorsey in the top post, with Dorsey remaining a member of
the board until his term expires at the 2022 meeting of stockholders.
Trump era
Like many Silicon Valley celebrities, from
Mark Zuckerberg
and Steve Jobs to
Bill Gates or
Michael Dell, Dorsey dropped out of college,
never graduating from either of the universities he attended, one in his native
Missouri and the other in New York.
Dorsey is credited with coming up with the idea for Twitter
when eventual co-founder Evan Williams gave workers at blogging startup Odeo
two weeks to work on fun new projects as a way to break up the daily routine.
He ran Twitter from 2007-2008 and returned later as CEO
after
Dick Costolo resigned in June 2015.
With Dorsey at the helm, Twitter reported its first
profitable quarter for the last three months of 2017, and then two full years
in the green, before slipping back into the red in 2020.
Twitter in March 2020 made a deal with key investors to end
an effort to oust the chief, creating a new committee on the board of directors
to keep tabs on company leadership.
Dorsey came under pressure in 2020 from
Elliott Management
amid concerns he had spread himself too thin by running both Twitter and
Square.
Yet during Trump's presidency, Twitter was widely seen as
the medium used to broadcast America's deepening political and cultural rifts.
New CEO
Dorsey took the controversial decision to permanently ban
Trump from the platform, where the former president had amassed 88.7 million
followers.
Dorsey made the decision days after Trump whipped up a mob
of supporters who stormed the US Capitol, where they tried to prevent Joe Biden
being confirmed winner of the 2020 election.
Supporters of the former president accused Dorsey and the
social media giants of trying to curb free speech, and many quit to join new,
far-right-friendly platforms.
But some also defended the hard decisions Dorsey had to
make.
"People tend to conflate jack dorsey with twitter
censorship, but my sense is he's actually done what he could these past few
years to keep the platform relatively open," tweeted Mike Solana, head of
the private equity firm Founders Fund.
"Things will be worse without him, not better.
godspeed, bird king." he added.
Twitter's incoming CEO
Agrawal joined the company in
2011 and has served as chief technology officer since October 2017, where
he was responsible for the network's technical strategy.
Agrawal holds a PhD in computer science from
Stanford University and a bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering
from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay.
Nasdaq briefly suspended trading of Twitter on Monday,
citing "news pending," but the share was up 4.5 percent following the
announcement.
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