- Jack Dorsey cofounded Twitter in 2006, and the company has made him a billionaire.
- He is famous for his unusual life of luxury, including a daily fasting routine, regular ice baths, and a penchant for dating models.
- Dorsey holds two CEO jobs at Twitter and Square, and activist investor Elliott Management has threatened to oust him from Twitter.
- Dorsey is now on damage control following a massive July 15 hack on Twitter that compromised more than 100 accounts, including those of Elon Musk and Barack Obama.
- A lawmaker is calling for Dorsey to join his fellow tech leaders of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook in an antitrust hearing designed to investigate the firms’ monopolistic grip of the market.
- Visit Business Insider’s home page for more stories.
From fighting armies of bots to quashing rumors about sending his beard hair to rapper Azealia Banks, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey leads an unusual life of luxury.
Dorsey has had a turbulent career in Silicon Valley. After cofounding Twitter in 2006, he was booted as the company’s CEO two years later, but returned in 2015 having set up his second company, Square.
Since then, he has led the company through the techlash that has engulfed social media companies, at one point testifying before Congress alongside Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
His latest threat comes from Elliott Management, an activist investor seeking Dorsey’s removal from Twitter, per Bloomberg reporting. The firm holds substantial stock in Twitter and four board seats.
And on July 15, hackers compromised 130 Twitter accounts, including those of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Kanye West, in a bitcoin scam. The hack exposed the security risks of the platform, and now a lawmaker is calling upon Dorsey to appear in an upcoming antitrust hearing that will feature the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.
Dorsey has elsewhere provoked his fair share of controversy and criticism, extolling fasting and ice baths as part of his daily routine. His existence is not entirely spartan, however. Like some other billionaires, he owns a stunning house, dates models, and drives fast cars.
Scroll on to read more about the fabulous life of Jack Dorsey.
Rebecca Borison and Madeline Stone contributed reporting to an earlier version of this story.
Dorsey began programming while attending Bishop DuBourg High School in St. Louis.
At age 15, Dorsey wrote dispatch software that is still used by some taxi companies.
Source: Bio.
When he wasn't checking out specialty electronics stores or running a fantasy football league for his friends, Dorsey frequently attended punk-rock concerts.
These days Dorsey doesn't favour the spiky hairdo.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Like many of his fellow tech billionaires, Dorsey never graduated college.
He briefly attended the Missouri University of Science and Technology and transferred to New York University before calling it quits.
Source: Bio.
In 2000, Dorsey built a simple prototype that let him update his friends on his life via BlackBerry and email messaging.
Nobody else really seemed interested, so he put away the idea for a bit.
Source: The Unofficial Stanford Blog
Fun fact: Jack Dorsey is also a licensed masseur.
He got his license in about 2002, before exploding onto the tech scene.
Sources: The Wall Street Journal
He got a job at a podcasting company called Odeo, where he met his future Twitter cofounders.
Odeo went out of business in 2006, so Dorsey returned to his messaging idea, and Twitter was born.
On March 21, 2006, Dorsey posted the first tweet.
Dorsey kept his Twitter handle simple, "@jack."
Dorsey and his cofounders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, bought the Twitter domain name for roughly $7,000.
Dorsey took out his nose ring to look the part of a CEO. He was 30 years old.
A year later, Dorsey was already less hands-on at Twitter.
By 2008, Williams had taken over as CEO, and Dorsey transitioned to chairman of Twitter's board. Dorsey immediately got started on new projects. He invested in Foursquare and launched a payments startup called Square that lets small-business owners accept credit card payments through a smartphone attachment.
In 2011, Dorsey got the chance to interview US President Barack Obama in the first Twitter Town Hall.
Dorsey had to remind Obama to keep his replies under 140 characters, Twitter's limit at the time.
Source: Twitter
Twitter went public in November 2013, and within hours Dorsey was a billionaire.
In 2014 Forbes pegged Dorsey's net worth at $2.2 billion. As of March of this year he was worth roughly $5.1 billion.
It was revealed in a 2019 filing that Dorsey earned just $1.40 for his job as Twitter CEO the previous year.
The $1.40 salary actually represented a pay rise for Dorsey, who in previous years had refused any payment at all.
He's far from the only Silicon Valley mogul to take a measly salary, Mark Zuckerberg makes $1 a year as CEO of Facebook.
Dorsey does, however, hold Twitter shares worth $557 million at the time of the filing.
Source: Business Insider
He might have been worth more had he not given back 10% of his stock to Square.
This helped Square employees, giving them more equity and stock options. It was also helpful in acquiring online food-delivery startup Caviar.
Sources: Business Insider and Caviar
With his newfound wealth, he bought a BMW 3 Series, but reportedly doesn't drive it often.
"Now he's able to say, like, 'The BMW is the only car I drive, because it's the best automotive engineering on the planet,' or whatever," Twitter cofounder Biz Stone told The New Yorker in 2013.
Source: The New Yorker
He also reportedly paid $9.9 million for this seaside house on El Camino Del Mar in the exclusive Seacliff neighborhood of San Francisco.
The house has a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, which Dorsey views as a marvel of design.
Source: Business Insider
He works from home one day a week.
In an interview with journalist Kara Swisher conducted over Twitter, Dorsey said he works every Tuesday out of his kitchen.
He also told Kara Swisher that Elon Musk is his favourite Twitter user.
Dorsey said Musk's tweets are, "focused on solving existential problems and sharing his thinking openly."
He added that he enjoys all the "ups and downs" that come with Musk's sometimes unpredictable use of the site. Musk himself replied, tweeting his thanks and "Twitter rocks!" followed by a string of random emojis.
Source: Business Insider
Facebook CEO and rival Mark Zuckerberg once served Jack Dorsey a goat he killed himself.
Dorsey told Rolling Stone about the meal, which took place in 2011. Dorsey said the goat was served cold, and that he personally stuck to salad.
Source: Rolling Stone
His eating habits have raised eyebrows.
Appearing on a podcast run by a health guru who previously said that vaccines caused autism, Dorsey said he eats one meal a day and fasts all weekend. He said the first time he tried fasting it made him feel like he was hallucinating.
"It was a weird state to be in. But as I did it the next two times, it just became so apparent to me how much of our days are centered around meals and how - the experience I had was when I was fasting for much longer, how time really slowed down," he said.
The comments drew fierce criticism from many who said Dorsey was normalizing eating disorders.
In a later interview with Wired Dorsey said he eats seven meals a week, "just dinner."
Sources: Business Insider, The New Statesman
In the early days of Twitter, Dorsey aspired to be a fashion designer.
Dorsey would regularly don leather jackets and slim suits by Prada and Hermès, as well as Dior Homme reverse-collar dress shirts, a sort of stylish take on the popped collar.
More recently he favours edgier outfits, including the classic black turtleneck favoured by Silicon Valley luminaries like Steve Jobs.
Sources: CBS News and The Wall Street Journal
He also re-introduced the nose-ring and grew a beard.
Dorsey seems to care less about looking the part of a traditional CEO these days.
Singer Azealia Banks claimed to have been sent clippings of Dorsey's beard hair to fashion into a protective amulet, although Dorsey denied this happened.
In 2016 Banks posted on her now-deleted Twitter account that Dorsey sent her his hair, "in an envelope." Dorsey later told the HuffPo that the beard-posting incident never happened.
Sources: Business Insider and HuffPo
Dorsey frequently travels the world and shares his photos with his 4 million Twitter followers.
On his travels, Dorsey meets heads of state, including Japan's Prime Minister Shinzō Abe.
Source: Twitter
Tweets about his vacation in Myanmar also provoked an outcry.
Dorsey tweeted glowingly about a vacation he took to Myanmar for his birthday in December 2018. "If you're willing to travel a bit, go to Myanmar," he said.
This came at the height of the Rohingya crisis, and Dorsey was attacked for his blithe promotion of the country - especially since social media platforms were accused of having been complicit in fuelling hatred towards the Rohingya.
Source: Business Insider
However, Dorsey says he doesn't care about "looking bad."
In a bizarre Huffington Post interview, Dorsey was asked whether Donald Trump - an avid tweeter - could be removed from the platform if he called on his followers to murder a journalist. Dorsey gave a vague answer which drew sharp criticism.
Following the interview's publication, Dorsey said he doesn't care about "looking bad." "I care about being open about how we're thinking and about what we see," he said.
In September 2018, Jack Dorsey was grilled by lawmakers alongside Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
Dorsey and Sandberg were asked about election interference on Twitter and Facebook as well as alleged anti-conservative bias in social media companies.
Source: Business Insider
During the hearing, Dorsey shared a snapshot of his spiking heart rate on Twitter.
Dorsey was in the hot seat for several hours. His heart rate peaked at 109 beats per minute.
Source: Business Insider
When he's not in Washington, Dorsey regularly hops in and out of ice baths and saunas.
Dorsey said in the "Tales of the Crypt" podcast that he started using ice baths and saunas in the evenings around 2016.
He will alternately sit in his barrel sauna for 15 minutes and then switch to an ice bath for three. He repeats this routine three times, before finishing it off with a one-minute ice bath.
He also likes to take an icy dip in the mornings to wake him up.
Source: CNBC
Dorsey's dating life has sparked intrigue. In 2018, he was reported to be dating Sports Illustrated model Raven Lyn Corneil.
Page Six reported in September last year that the pair were spotted together at the Harper's Bazaar Icons party during New York Fashion Week. Page Six also reported that Dorsey's exes included actress Lily Cole and ballet dancer Sofiane Sylve.
Source: Page Six
He's a big believer in cryptocurrency, frequently tweeting about its virtues.
In particular, Dorsey is a fan of Bitcoin, which he described in early 2019 as "resilient" and "principled." He told the "Tales of the Crypt" podcast in March that he was maxing out the $10,000 weekly spending limit on Square's Cash App buying up Bitcoin.
Source: Business Insider and CNBC
At the end of 2019 Dorsey said he would move to Africa for at least three months in 2020.
Dorsey's announcement followed a tour of Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa. "Africa will define the future (especially the bitcoin one!). Not sure where yet, but I'll be living here for 3-6 months mid 2020," he tweeted.
Dorsey then came under threat of being ousted as Twitter CEO by activist investor Elliott Management.
Both Bloomberg and CNBC reported in late February 2020 that major Twitter investor Elliott Management - led by Paul Singer - was seeking to replace Dorsey.
Reasons given included the fact that Dorsey splits his time between two firms by acting as CEO to both Twitter and financial tech firm Square, as well as his planned move to Africa.
Source: Business Insider
Tesla CEO and frequent Twitter user Elon Musk weighed in on the news, throwing his support behind Dorsey.
"Just want to say that I support @jack as Twitter CEO," Musk tweeted, adding that Dorsey has a good heart using the heart emoji.
Source: Business Insider
Dorsey managed to strike a truce with Elliott Management.
Twitter announced on March 9 that it had reached a deal with Elliott Management which would leave Jack Dorsey in place as CEO.
The deal included a $1 billion investment from private equity firm Silver Lake, and partners from both Elliott Management and Silver Lake joined Twitter's board.
Patrick Pichette, lead independent director of Twitter's board, said he was "confident we are on the right path with Jack's leadership," but added that a new temporary committee would be formed to instruct the board's evaluation of Twitter's leadership.
On April 7, Dorsey announced that he was forming a new charity fund that would help in global relief efforts amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Dorsey said he would pour $1 billion of his own Square equity into the fund, or roughly 28% of his total wealth.
The fund, dubbed Start Small LLC, will first focus on helping in the fight against the coronavirus disease, which has spread across the globe and infected more than 1.3 million people.
The CEO said he will be making all transactions on behalf of the fund public in a spreadsheet.
On July 15, hackers compromised 130 Twitter accounts in a bitcoin scam.
The accounts of high-profile verified accounts belonging to Bill Gates, Kim Kardashian West, and others were hacked, with attackers tweeting out posts asking users to send payment in bitcoin to fraudulent cryptocurrency addresses.
As a solution, Twitter temporarily blocked all verified accounts - those with blue check marks on their profiles - but the damage was done.
The hack is one of the largest of its kind in Twitter's history.
The site's apparent vulnerability to security breaches prompted Republican lawmaker Jim Jordan to ask for Dorsey to join an upcoming antitrust hearing.
It's unclear if he will attend the hearing, which is designed to investigate whether Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have engaged in anti-competitive business practices to maintain their dominance of the market.