Of the many strange things that happened before Twitter changed ownership, Jack Dorsey’s always intrigued me “Elon is the only solution I trust.” His insistence that Musk is uniquely positioned to “expand the light of consciousness” was an odd endorsement, even by Dorsey’s usual oddball standards. But Dorsey had long idolized Musk, and the two men had a deeper connection than many viewers realized.
So says a new book examining Jack Dorsey’s role in Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. author Bloomberg Correspondent Kurt Wagner, How Dorsey saved Twitter in 2015 and how his actions (or often lack thereof) led to the acquisition of Musk and ultimately, .
Wagner’s book is not the first to explore the stormy events of the past two years — Musk biographer Walter Isaacson seat for drama – but The fight for the bird sheds new light on the Dorsey side of the equation. “Jack was bringing Elon to sites outside of Twitter, visiting him at the SpaceX launch facility, the two of them had a relationship that I don’t think people paid much attention to,” Wagner tells Engadget. So when Musk started buying a large stake in the company, “Jack kind of stepped in and did everything he could” to make the deal happen.
The book, which began as a Dorsey biography before forcing Wagner to change his plans, tells the story of the enigmatic Twitter co-founder, whose unorthodox management style sometimes worked against the company’s own interests.
On Twitter, Wagner wrote that Dorsey “rarely spoke” in meetings and did not like to make decisions. Internally, this was a source of confusion, as executives often had to guess what Dorsey was thinking about a given issue. “People would be surprised how little he directs [Twitter and Square]he was really advising them in a weird way,” says Wagner.
This dynamic was reflected in the Twitter product. Wagner reports that Dorsey initially encouraged the product team to eventually “build a feature called.,” Twitter’s experiment with disappearing posts. But Dorsey came to “hate” the feature, and the company was publicly applauded less than a year after its release. “Even though Fleets thought it was a bad decision, he never stepped in to stop the product or move the team in another direction,” Wagner writes.
The fight for the bird It also details many of Dorsey’s quirks: days of silent meditation, his affinity for “salt juice” (a mixture of water, pink Himalayan sea salt, and lemon juice), and his recent bitcoin addiction. “He goes through these stages in his life where he’s different, he looks different, he acts different, his priorities are different, and I think that’s kind of a reflection of what he’s obsessed with,” Wagner said.
Giving Musk a more influential role at Twitter was another idea that Dorsey was weighing in on. In 2020, he tried to get a seat on the board of the Mask company. Elliott Management. Dorsey was able to keep his job, but Musk couldn’t get a seat on the board because, he told Musk, the rest of the board was “super risk averse.” (By 2020, Musk had already faced at least two major lawsuits over his tweets.)
Dorsey would also tell Musk that the board veto was the time I decided to work on leaving the company. He wasn’t always interested in running Twitter, but the problems with Elliott changed that. “He thought that Twitter served this great purpose … its place in the world was not to make money for shareholders,” Wagner explains. “And ultimately he wasn’t that interested in playing the Wall Street game, which is a problem when you’re a publicly traded company.”
So in 2022, after he steps down as CEO, Dorsey encourages Musk to use his new position as Twitter’s primary stakeholder to address the “original sin” of Twitter’s existence as a corporate entity beholden to advertisers and political interests. did Dorsey believed Musk loved Twitter for the same reasons. So he supported Musk when Musk decided to buy the company and take it private.
Dorsey has publicly approved the move, promising to transfer his Twitter shares to the new entity, saving Musk about $1 billion. He voted to approve the deal along with the rest of the company’s board.
As Wagner points out The fight for the birdDorsey finally After trying to get out of the deal, Musk said, “everything went south.” But by then, Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account was unrecognizable. “He clearly supported this new idea, the takeover from Elon,” says Wagner. “And as a result, the company he co-founded and led in various ways for nearly 16 years no longer exists. X is here, but Twitter is gone. “His legacy has really suffered from this whole disaster.”
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