As the debate over Elon Musk’s proposed takeover of Twitter rumbles on, one man has stayed mostly silent: Jack Dorsey.
After co-founding Twitter in 2006 and serving intermittently as CEO and chairman of the board, he left late last year.
Dorsey stepped aside for chief technology officer Parag Agrawal to become CEO in November.
He currently serves on the company’s board, but will be leaving in ‘spring 2022’ to focus on his finance company Block.
But what does he think about the world’s richest man taking over Twitter to turn it private? A few recent tweets have given us some clues.
For starters, Dorsey – just like Musk – is not a fan of Twitter’s board of directors.
Responding to a tweet over the weekend, Dorsey called the board a ‘dysfunction’ of Twitter.
When Dorsey left Twitter in 2021, there was a great amount of speculation that board member Elliott Management had something to do with it.
Either way, there’s clearly no love lost between them.
Musk has already confirmed that, if his bid is successful, there’ll be no need for a board. Which means those members lose cushy part-time jobs.
But while it seems Dorsey could be in favour of taking Twitter private to make the necessary changes to it – he is also not a fan of centralised technology.
As a fan of Bitcoin, Dorsey clearly sits on the side of free-for-all tech rather than having it controlled by an individual or organisation.
He has become a big proponent of giving users choices in terms of algorthims used for content discovery.
In 2019, he announced a new project, called Bluesky, that was made up of a ‘small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized [sic] standard for social media.’
Unlike a regular app, which is created and owned by an individual or corporation, decentralised apps have no central ownership and often operate on a blockchain.
The blockchain, which is a mutually agreed upon set of rules, helps keep control out of a central authority and give each user equal power.
For Twitter, this would mean that decisions like which content to moderate wouldn’t be taken by social media executives like Dorsey.
In effect, Dorsey would be relinquishing control of Twitter’s standards in place of rules agreed upon by the community.
Given this approach, the Twitter co-founder may be pretty sceptical over Elon Musk’s plan to take over his creation.
We won’t know for sure until Dorsey specifically addresses the matter – which he may not do with complete candour until he’s left Twitter’s board.
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