Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey confirmed he’s stepping down from his role as chief executive of the social media platform.
“I want you all to know that this was my decision and I own it,” Dorsey said in an open letter to Twitter employees.
He added that he views companies that are “founder-led” as having “a single point of failure,” and said he has “worked hard to ensure this company can break away from its founding and founders.”
He also confirmed that their Chief Technology Officer Parag Agrawal becomes Twitter’s CEO starting today, while Bret Taylor becomes their board chair.
Dorsey’s resignation as CEO was reported on by CNBC before it was officially announced, while Reuters and Bloomberg also shared details on the story, all citing unnamed sources “familiar with the matter.”
Twitter’s stock has been halted by the New York Stock Exchange due to a pending news announcement from the company. Before trading was halted, Twitter’s stock was up 3.42% for the day.
In addition to his role at Twitter, Jack Dorsey also serves as the CEO of payments company Square, which has taken an active role in advancing the adoption of bitcoin (BTC).
Jack Dorsey is well-known as an advocate of bitcoin, often calling it “the native currency of the Internet.”
The tech entrepreneur said during the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami this past June that if he wasn’t working at Square or Twitter, he would be working on Bitcoin, while adding “If it needed more help than Square and Twitter, I would leave them for bitcoin.”
Meanwhile, Twitter’s new CEO, Parag Agrawal, is not yet known as a bitcoin proponent, but has in the past shown interest in the decentralization of social media networks.
In 2019, he was tasked by the company with finding a lead for a Twitter-funded initiative known as Bluesky, which Jack Dorsey said would “develop an open and decentralized standard for social media.”
Agrawal joined Twitter in 2011 as an engineer, and has served as the company’s CTO since 2017.
Meanwhile, Bret Taylor, Twitter’s new board chair, is the current president and Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the major business software firm Salesforce.
In his letter that announced the resignation, Dorsey said about Taylor that he is someone who “understands entrepreneurship, taking risks, companies at massive scale, technology, product, and he’s an engineer.”
Taylor commented on cryptocurrencies in 2019 during an event hosted by the Global Blockchain Business Council, where he said that “the past decade has been very interesting for blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies.”
“Blockchain is an ideal technology to bring customer value that spans multiple companies and multiple organizations,” Taylor said at the time.
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(Updated at 15:48 with a report from Bloomberg TV. Updated at 15:55 UTC with a comment from Jack Dorsey. Updated at 16:39 UTC with more details about the new CEO and the chairman of the board. (Updated at 17:09 UTC with additional details from Dorsey’s letter.)
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