On Wednesday, CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter – Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Jack Dorsey respectively – turned up for a hearing before the US Senate Commerce Committee on moderation practices of their platforms. Of the three, who were videoconferencing due to the coronavirus pandemic, Dorsey was the most eye-catching. Instead of connecting to a computer – Zuckerberg was very well lit and the background was naturally blurred behind him, it is likely that he connected a video camera to the computer – Dorsey spoke to the US Senate using his cell phone. He was also the only one dressed informally, and his neck and part of his chest were covered with a long, bristly beard, which came out from the lower part of the frame. The beard, along with Zuckerberg's connection problems, was the most commented on of the whole event.
The Senate hearing was officially called to address section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 law that protects platforms from liability for user-generated content. In fact, the discussion has been about whether both Republicans and Democrats (but especially Republicans) believe that the moderation practices of internet platforms need to be changed: the former argue that platforms censor conservative thinking, the latter that fail to act as a barrier to false content that incites hatred and violence. Of the three CEOs, Dorsey is probably the most active on this issue.
A few months ago, Twitter was the first social network to black out a tweet from President Donald Trump that appeared to incite violence against Black Lives Matter protesters, sparking much controversy that also involved Facebook (Zuckerberg refused to black out the post with the same text that Trump had written on Facebook). Since then, Twitter has repeatedly blacked out or, more often, flagged misleading or fake tweets from Trump and other politicians. Most recently, Twitter blocked users from sharing a New York Post article on the platform that contained an unverified story against Joe Biden's son. These initiatives drew a lot of anger on Twitter, which was often seen during the audition. Ted Cruz, a very conservative Republican senator, at one point asked Dorsey “who the hell elected you” to decide what people can post on social networks.
Despite being a veteran of Silicon Valley's top executives, Dorsey is a distinctive figure, even within the already peculiar category of American tech entrepreneurs. For example, the fundamental decision to block links to the New York Post story on Twitter was not made by him. Dorsey did not participate in the internal debate when the decision was made, the Wall Street Journal wrote, and only intervened directly hours later, writing on Twitter that making such an important decision suddenly and without providing context was “unacceptable”. .
Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we're blocking: unacceptable. https://t.co/v55vDVVlgt
– jack (@jack) October 14, 2020
The Wall Street Journal, somewhat treacherously, defines his managerial style as “delegating most of the important decisions and at the same time following one's personal passions.” The idea that Dorsey pays little attention to his companies has haunted him since the early years of Twitter. The social network was founded in 2006 by four people: Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams. Dorsey, who was not the most gifted programmer of the four but had the most charismatic personality, was named CEO, and it was he who sent the first tweet in history.
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Within a few years, however, his colleagues began to be unhappy that Dorsey was not focused enough on the startup. The first years of Twitter were very turbulent: the social network grew exponentially but had serious technical problems, which made it unusable for a long time. Veteran users still remember the «Fail Whale», that is, the drawing of the white whale that appeared as an error screen when Twitter was offline.
Under these circumstances, Dorsey had continued to pursue his own personal interests and indeed extended them, taking advantage of Twitter stardom to hang out with celebrities and trendy clubs, at least according to Hatching Twitter, a book on the early years of Twitter published by journalist Nick Bilton. who then worked at the New York Times (now special correspondent for Vanity Fair). Dorsey spent a lot of time doing “hot yoga”, a type of yoga that is done in conditions of high humidity, and he had enrolled in drawing and tailoring classes, because one of his dreams was to become a fashion designer. According to Bilton, at one point Evan Williams, who was the most serious and motivated of the founders (he had already founded Blogger, the blogging platform then bought by Google, and later, after Twitter, he would have founded Medium), said to Dorsey: ” You can be a tailor or you can be the CEO of Twitter, but you can't be both. ” Shortly thereafter, in October 2008, Dorsey was forced to resign and Williams took his place. However, Dorsey remained a member of the board of directors.
In 2010 Dorsey founded Square, a remarkably successful digital payments startup, and in 2015 he was re-appointed CEO of Twitter, after both Evan Williams and his successor, Dick Costolo, had failed. Dorsey was appointed interim CEO in July 2015 and permanently confirmed in October of the same year. To date, he is the only one of the great Silicon Valley entrepreneurs – with the exception of Elon Musk – to be the CEO of two major companies at the same time: Twitter and Square.
Being the head of two multinational companies worth a few tens of billions of dollars each (Twitter is worth about 40 billion, Square about 75), with thousands of employees and hundreds of millions of users is already a rather complex job, but Dorsey has always succeeded. to maintain a low-stress lifestyle. In 2018, his 10-day meditation retreat in Myanmar was heavily commented on, all documented on Twitter. Last year he announced that he would spend six months in Africa to get to know the continent better, but then gave up. In 2019, in an interview with a wellness podcast, Dorsey said that he meditates twice a day, for a total of two hours (though sometimes, he said, he doesn't have enough time), and that both in the morning and in the evening. has a complex and long ritual of saunas and ice baths. Also, practice intermittent fasting – eat only one meal a day and experience complete fasting on weekends. These habits, people close to Dorsey said, change often, so they may never be the same as they were in 2019.
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In any case, the tales of Dorsey's less concentrated entrepreneurial style are common and widespread. In a recent profile on Vanity Fair (again written by Nick Bilton) Twitter employees complain that Dorsey would be too busy with Square, while Square employees complain that he would be too focused on Twitter. In the Wall Street Journal, executives from both companies said Dorsey delegates most of the most important decisions to his subordinates, and that the boss's many absences have counterproductively slowed the adoption of new products and strategies. The reason it took Twitter so long to increase the number of characters per tweet from 140 to 280 (it happened two years ago, in the fall of 2018) is that it took Dorsey a full two years to make a decision, even though its engineers had everything ready.
These anecdotes have made Dorsey an icon of the wellness movement (the New York Times wrote that Twitter's founder is “the Gwyneth Paltrow of Silicon Valley”) but also raised many doubts about his ability to run two major companies at the same time. weather. Square's results are good, also because the digital payments sector has been growing strongly for many years: since 2015, the year of its debut on the stock exchange, the company's stock has multiplied its value by 14 times.
Twitter's performances, on the other hand, are more chiaroscuro. Since Dorsey rejoined CEO in 2015, the social network's share value has risen by about 70 percent. It's a good five years, but Twitter is part of the Nasdaq list which, as The Economist wrote, has grown 400 percent in ten years. Furthermore, net of financial performance, Twitter has some structural problems that Dorsey has not been able to solve, first of all the anemic growth in the number of users. Facebook has grown from 1.4 billion monthly active users in 2015 to 2.7 billion today. Twitter went from 308 million in 2015 to 321 million in early 2019. The figure stops a year and a half ago because the increase in users was so unsatisfactory that Twitter stopped making the numbers public and started instead. , to quote the daily active users, which today are 187 million. Twitter, which when compared to Facebook is a very small social network, is largely kept relevant by the fact that politicians like Donald Trump have chosen it as the primary vehicle for their communications.
Twitter's most recent quarterly results, released Thursday, reflect these problems: In the third quarter of the year, Twitter only added one million new daily active users, and while revenue increased 14 percent, it's still less than +18. percent recorded overall by Amazon, Apple and Facebook. Twitter's stock lost more than 16 percent on the stock market after the announcement.
Dorsey's leadership problems became very dangerous for him when, in March of this year, the investment fund Elliott Management, led by billionaire Paul Singer, very famous for the ruthless way in which he manages business, began to buy many shares of Twitter (worth about a billion dollars) and, gaining importance in the company, began to push for the removal of Dorsey giving as a reason precisely the fact that it is impossible to be efficient CEO of two complex companies like Square and Twitter. Dorsey first gave up his semester in Africa, then after a long bargain he managed to keep his post, as long as Singer's representatives join the board.
In the months of the coronavirus pandemic, Dorsey remained one of the most interesting tech entrepreneurs: he donated a billion dollars to charity and was the first to announce that Twitter employees who started working from home due to the lockdown will be able to continue. to do it indefinitely. Dorsey has long theorized that the workplace should be decentralized. He himself does not have a computer and works only with his smartphone, because he concentrates better.
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In many ways, this week's Senate hearing was also an election event. The American elections are in a few days, and social networks will play an important role, so much so that everyone is taking countermeasures. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have taken steps to avoid the spread of falsehoods and media manipulation on election night. Dorsey, in the Senate, said Twitter acts to maintain “the integrity” of the conversation around the election, but has also had to remind several times, to both Democratic and Republican senators, that Twitter alone does not have the power to change the state. electoral outcome. Indeed, due to electoral uncertainty, Twitter could lose a lot of advertising revenue.
