Is former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey as eccentric as Elon Musk? The 47-year-old loves ice baths, doesn’t eat on weekends and was rumoured to have sent his beard hair to Azealia Banks in the post
- Dorsey stepped down from Twitter in 2021, only to make way for equally eccentric billionaire Elon Musk to take over; he’s since launched a new platform called Bluesky and criticised the Tesla founder
- The lifelong tech-head paid himself less than US$2 salary in 2017 and 2018, has dated Sports Illustrated model Raven Lyn Corneil, and once wanted to be a fashion designer
From his friendship with Elon Musk to quashing rumours about sending his beard hair to rapper Azealia Banks, the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey leads an interesting life.
Dorsey has had a turbulent career in Silicon Valley. After co-founding Twitter on March 21, 2006, he was booted as the company’s CEO two years later, but returned in 2015 having set up his second company, Square, which he rebranded as Block in 2021.
Here’s what we know about Dorsey’s career rise and life outside of work.
Jack Dorsey began programming while he was still at school
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, according to a biography on Dorsey.
Like many of his fellow tech billionaires, Dorsey never graduated university. He briefly attended the Missouri University of Science and Technology and transferred to New York University before calling it quits in 1999 one term before graduation to focus on his idea for Twitter, according to the biography.
Dorsey first had the idea for Twitter (now X) in 2000
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, according to a Stanford blog post.
He then got a job at a podcasting company called Odeo, where he met his future Twitter co-founders. 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”. He hasn’t changed it since.