Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey Steps Down as CEO

Jack Dorsey is stepping down as CEO of Twitter, the social media company he co-founded in 2006. He will be replaced by Twitter’s chief technology officer, Parag Agrawal, a 10-year veteran of the company.

Twitter stock rose on the news, which was first reported by CNBC.

“I’ve decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders,” Dorsey said in a statement. “My trust in Parag as Twitter’s CEO is deep. His work over the past 10 years has been transformational. I’m deeply grateful for his skill, heart, and soul. It’s his time to lead.”

Dorsey will remain on the company’s board of directors until May of next year. He was Twitter’s founding CEO but left the company once before, after a falling-out with a fellow co-founder. He returned to the top job in 2015.

In San Francisco, the Twitter founder stepped into brewing tensions over homelessness in 2018 when he publicly quarreled with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. The two were on opposite sides of a ballot proposition to enact a gross receipts tax on businesses that make more than $50 million in gross annual receipts to fund support for those who are homeless. Benioff supported and largely funded Proposition C, whereas Dorsey was against it, citing Mayor London Breed and state Sen. Scott Wiener’s opposition.

“This is about me supporting Mayor @LondonBreed for *the* reason she was elected. The Mayor doesn’t support Prop C, and we should listen to her. I support the Mayor, and I’m committed to helping her execute her plan,” Dorsey tweeted publicly to Benioff in 2018.

Proposition C ultimately was approved by San Francisco voters. Notably, Twitter’s headquarters is in the central Market Street area, a neighborhood that often becomes a flashpoint around the city’s policies on homelessness.

Dorsey is also CEO of Square, the financial payments company he founded in 2009, and has been criticized by some investors for leading two public companies at once. The hedge fund Elliott Management, a major shareholder, sought to replace Dorsey last year. It argued that Twitter should have a CEO solely focused on running the company. The hedge fund backed off its demand, however, after striking a deal with Twitter management.

Beyond running the two companies, Dorsey is known to have many passions including the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and meditation. He told Wired magazine in 2020 that he eats just one meal a day and tries to spend two hours a day meditating.

While Twitter is popular among celebrities, politicians and the media, it has been slow to innovate compared with top competitors such as Facebook, Snapchat and TikTok. The microblogging platform has stayed largely the same for years. Only recently has it introduced new features, such as Twitter Blue, a subscription service for frequent users, and Spaces, for audio chats, as part of an ambitious effort to more than double annual revenue and attract new users.

Twitter has just over 200 million daily active users, a common industry metric.

“I believe that strategy to be bold and right,” Agrawal wrote in a note to Twitter employees on Monday. “But our critical challenge is how we work to execute against it and deliver results – that’s how we’ll make Twitter the best it can be for our customers, shareholders, and for each of you.”

Agrawal joins a growing group of major tech-sector CEOs who are Indian American, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and IBM CEO Arvind Krishna.

He takes the reins of Twitter in a time of controversy. Twitter was caught up in the heated political atmosphere leading up to the 2020 election, particularly when it banned former President Donald Trump following his incitement of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Dorsey defended the move, saying Trump’s tweets after the event resulted in a risk to public safety and created an “extraordinary and untenable circumstance” for the company. Trump sued the company, along with Facebook and YouTube, in July for alleged censorship.

Critics argued that Twitter took too long to address hate speech, harassment and other harmful activity on its platform, particularly during the 2020 campaign.

“If he’s actually stepping away from Twitter this time, Dorsey leaves behind a mixed legacy,” said Paul Barrett, deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. “A platform that’s useful and potent for quick communication but one that’s been exploited by a range of bad actors, including former President Donald Trump, who did his best on Twitter to undermine democracy — until Dorsey’s people finally had enough and shut him down.”

The early days of Twitter began with a tweet sent by Dorsey on March 21, 2006, that read “just setting up my twttr.” Twitter went through a period of robust growth during its early years, but as its expansion slowed the San Francisco company began tweaking its format in a bid to make it easier and more engaging to use.

Dorsey became Twitter CEO in 2007, but was forced out the following year. He returned to the role in 2015. In his goodbye letter, Dorsey said he has “worked hard to ensure this company can break away from its founding and founders” and that to focus too much on whether companies are led by their founders is “severely limiting.”

Dorsey shared an email to staff announcing his departure on Twitter, describing it as “a tough one” but as his own decision.

“There aren’t many companies that get to this level. And there aren’t many founders that choose their company over their own ego,” he wrote. “I know we’ll prove this was the right move.”

Associated Press reporters Michelle Chapman and Tali Arbel contributed to this report.