Jack Dorsey was intrigued as a teenager with how technology could be harnessed to facilitate real-time communication. The idea led Dorsey to cofound Twitter, the social-media company he twice headed as CEO. A billionaire tech entrepreneur, Dorsey is also a cofounder of the mobile-payment company Block and a backer of the decentralized social-media platform Bluesky.
Early Life and Education
Jack Dorsey was born on November 19, 1976, in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the son of Tim and Marcia Dorsey, who still live in the city.
Dorsey attended St. Louis’ Bishop DuBourg High School. While a student there, he displayed an affinity for technology and a particular aptitude for programming. His first notable programming project came to fruition when he was only 15.
Interested in finding a way for fleets of vehicles to maintain real-time communication with one another, he created dispatching software that would allow the drivers of the vehicles to do just that. The software was so effective that taxicab companies would still be using it decades later.
Dorsey stayed in Missouri to attend college at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. He studied there only briefly, however, before transferring to New York University. Like many tech entrepreneurs before him, Dorsey didn’t finish school, choosing instead to move to the Bay Area to start his career.
Early Career
After arriving on the West Coast, Dorsey availed himself of the fast-growing Internet to sell his dispatching software online. The success of the software led him to consider how the principles of real-time communication could be applied elsewhere.
The idea for an instant-messaging service that could be used by friends and family to stay in touch with one another came to him in 2000. In 2006, he pitched the idea to Odeo, a now-defunct company whose executives included Biz Stone and Evan Williams.
Together with Stone and Williams, Dorsey established the company that would later become Twitter. They quickly developed a Twitter prototype, and Dorsey sent the platform’s first message (known as a “tweet”) on March 21, 2006.
Twitter initially drew the ire of many as being nothing more than a place for people to post banal, meaningless updates on their days. Also clouding its reputation during this time were its frequent technical issues.
The site nonetheless grew popular, first with bloggers and then with celebrities and other public figures. Among the latter group were 2008 US presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, both of whom used the platform to share updates on their campaigns.
With Dorsey serving as CEO, Twitter became the leading “microblogging” site—so named because users could post only 140-character-max tweets. By March of 2008, media outlets reported that Twitter boasted 1.3 million users.
Despite the site’s apparent success, Twitter’s board of directors was dissatisfied with Dorsey’s leadership. He was fired in October of 2008 in a move he told Vanity Fair felt like being “punched in the stomach.” With fellow cofounder Williams stepping in as CEO, Dorsey became Twitter’s chairman of the board.
Square
No longer responsible for the day-to-day leadership of Twitter, Dorsey turned his attention to another venture. In 2009 he cofounded Square, a company that provides tools to process credit card transactions on a mobile device.
Square launched the following year, and with Dorsey at the helm as CEO, it grew quickly, boasting two million users by 2012. The company subsequently expanded outside of North America and, in 2015, went public, at which time it was valued at $3 billion.
While he was busy leading Square, Twitter continued to grow. By the end of the 2012, it had 200 million monthly users. The following year, with Dorsey still serving as its chairman, Twitter raised $1.8 billion as part of its initial public offering. Dorsey was now a billionaire.
Return to Twitter
Dorsey was brought back by Twitter’s board to serve as CEO for the second time in 2015. The following year saw the company face scrutiny on various fronts, including Twitter’s role in driving the conversation surrounding the 2016 presidential campaign.
Dorsey testified in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2018 and met with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office in 2019. More scrutiny came when Twitter fact checked two of President Trump’s tweets in the leadup to the 2020 presidential election, then banned him from the platform the following year.
Dorsey himself decided to make his exit from Twitter the same year, stepping down as CEO in November. He remained on the board in a temporary capacity, during which time he approved the sale of the company to Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Post-Twitter Ventures
Dorsey continues to lead as CEO of the company formerly called Square (now known as Block). As of November 2021, Block had 98 million members.
Dorsey has also made news for his involvement in another social-media venture. Amid criticism by some, including Dorsey himself, of Musk’s leadership of Twitter, Bluesky arose in 2023 as a possible alternative.
Backed by Dorsey, Bluesky is decentralized social-media platform, meaning it is not controlled by any one person. In May of 2023, CNBC reported that downloads of Bluesky had risen more than 600 percent between March and April.