Twitter has announced that its until now CEO , Jack Dorsey , will continue to be for the time being. The position of the manager, co-founder of the company, has been jeopardized in recent weeks by the many voices critical of his management.
Although Dorsey will retain the position for now, investors will keep an eye on him until the end of the year with the idea of finding a replacement for him . At this time, the entrepreneur owns 2% of the shares of the 280-character firm.
Along with this decision, the bird company has announced that the investment firm Silver Lake will invest 1,000 million dollars in the social network. Twitter also plans to buy back 2 billion of its own shares in order to increase its share price. Thus Silver Lake and Elliott Management, the main supporter of the employer’s dismissal, would have taken seats on the Twitter board of directors.
Dorsey’s position would have been jeopardized for a number of reasons. The first of these, and the most important, would be the poor performance on the stock market that Twitter is having. Elliot Management, a fund led by Paul Singer, has lobbied for the head of the Twitter co-founder to roll for this reason . Since 2015, when Dorsey returned to the leadership of the social network, to date, the shares have risen less than 10%.
Likewise, Singer has also questioned the position of Dorsey, who in addition to being the CEO of Twitter has been since the payments firm Square , a company he founded in 2009.
On the other hand, Dorsey has shown his intention to spend six months traveling through Africa this year, something that some shareholders did not like too much and which they considered incompatible with his direction of the company.
However, on this last point the CEO of Twitter has reconsidered his plans. At the Morgan Stanley conference a few days ago, Dorsey said that due to the coronavirus and “everything that is happening in the world”, perhaps it was not the best time to consider a journey like the one he had planned.
However, Dorsey has stated that, since Africa will be one of the continents with the largest population in the coming decades, his intention is to understand how many African Internet users are using the Internet for the first time. The CEO of Twitter has also defended himself by assuring that he intended to telecommute, not to take a half-year sabbatical.
The comings and goings of the child’s father
Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone built a Twitter prototype in just two weeks back in 2006. It was launched in July of that year. Initially, as part of Obvious Corporation, Dorsey was its CEO, securing two rounds of funding for the company.
The ‘father’ of the microblogging social network remained in the position until two years later. In October 2008 Evan Williams (one of Twitter’s early investors) replaced him as CEO and went on to hold a testimonial title as chairman of the board. In March 2011, he returned to the company as CEO after Dick Costolo replaced Williams.
In July 2015 Costolo resigned as CEO and then Dorsey became interim CEO. Three months later he was appointed permanent CEO of the bird platform.
