Jack Dorsey makes $978M from selling Twitter to Elon Musk
Jack Dorsey in line for $978M payday from Elon Musk Twitter takeover
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has been the face and essential identity of the company throughout the company’s controversial existence.
Mr Dorsey, who came to the tech world after twice dropping out of university and becoming a certified masseuse, founded the social media platform in 2006 with Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams.
But despite Elon Musk circling the company and expected to become its new owner, it is not Twitter that has propelled Mr Dorsey into the ranks of Silicon Valley’s newly-minted billionaires.
An estimated 88 per cent of his $6.92bn worth, which places him 341st on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index on Monday, comes from an 11 per cent stake in credit card payment company Square. Dorsey is just popular on Twitter.
Mr Dorsey founded the fintech company in 2009 with Jim McKelvey and had the CEO role, as well as the CEO role at Twitter, a rare double responsibility that he has in common with Mr Musk, who runs Tesla at the same time as SpaceX.
He lost his CEO role at Twitter in 2008, but returned to the job in 2015, the same year that Square went public.
Last November, Twitter announced that Mr Dorsey was stepping down as the CEO of the company, to be replaced by the company’s chief technology officer Parag Agrawal.
He still remains the CEO, president and chairman of the board of Square, which rebranded as Block last December.
As of Monday, Square had a value of $61.65bn and had a revenue of $17.7bn in 2021.
In 2020 Mr Dorsey announced that he would put $1bn of his Square equity into Start Small LLC, which would first focus on fighting the coronavirus pandemic.
Mr Dorsey, who has mostly refused a paycheck from Twitter, only earned $1.40 in salary in 2018, a nod to the company’s former 140-character limit. He first became a billionaire in 2012, and still owns 2.3 percent of Twitter’s stock, including the beneficial ownership of some 18 million shares, according to the proxy even now that Twitter has been sold to Elon Musk for $44bn.
With this new deal, Mr Dorsey is earning around $978 million (£771 million) from his stake in the company.
