By Jack Dorsey in Washington, D.C., in 2018. Photo: Mark Warner / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
Jack Dorsey helped start two companies that changed how Americans talk and how they pay. Twitter turned the short public message into a daily habit. Square put a card reader on a phone and let small sellers take credit cards. Dorsey has now spent more than two decades moving between the two, and in recent years he has turned to Bitcoin and open messaging protocols.
He was born Nov. 19, 1976, in St. Louis, and attended Bishop DuBourg High School. He enrolled at the University of Missouri–Rolla in 1995, then transferred to New York University in 1997. He left NYU about two years later, one semester short of a degree, according to Wikipedia’s account of his life.
From dispatch software to Twitter
Dorsey worked as a programmer on dispatch software, the kind used to route couriers, taxis and emergency vehicles, and moved to California. In 2000 he started a company in Oakland built around that idea. That July he conceived a web-based service for real-time status updates and short messages.
He later pitched the concept at Odeo, a company interested in text messaging. With Biz Stone, he built a prototype of Twitter in about two weeks, and Evan Williams invested. Twitter, Inc. was founded in 2007, and Dorsey became chief executive.
His tenure was uneven. On Oct. 16, 2008, he lost the CEO job to Williams and became chairman. He returned in March 2011 as executive chairman. When Dick Costolo resigned in July 2015, Dorsey took over as interim CEO, and he was named permanent CEO that October.
The years that followed brought scrutiny. He testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in September 2018, and Twitter’s shares fell 6 percent afterward. In February 2020, the activist investor Elliott Management sought to remove him. An agreement came within days, and he stayed. He announced his resignation as CEO on Nov. 29, 2021, and Parag Agrawal succeeded him. Dorsey left the board in May 2022. When Elon Musk bought the company that October, Dorsey still held a 2.4 percent stake.
Square and Block
Dorsey co-developed Square with Jim McKelvey, and the mobile card-payment device went on sale in May 2010. Square filed for a New York Stock Exchange initial public offering on Oct. 14, 2015, when Dorsey owned 24.4 percent of the company. In March 2020 the FDIC allowed Square to open a bank, and that May the company said employees could work remotely for good.
On Dec. 1, 2021, Square renamed itself Block, Inc., keeping its ticker symbol. Its businesses include Square, Cash App, Afterpay, Bitkey and Tidal. Dorsey serves as its chief executive.
Bitcoin and open protocols
Since leaving Twitter, Dorsey has put much of his attention on Bitcoin and on decentralized software. He has said that if he were not running Twitter and Square, he would work on Bitcoin. He joined the board of Bluesky, a social protocol project that began inside Twitter, in February 2022, and left in May 2024. He cited the project’s move toward a more conventional corporate structure and centralized moderation tools.
He has also backed Nostr, another open protocol for social apps. In December 2022 he sent 14 bitcoin to a Nostr developer. In 2023 he provided seed funding for OCEAN, a Bitcoin mining pool that lets miners choose their own block templates. In 2025 he launched Bitchat, a messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks, and that November he announced support for diVine, a revival of the Vine video service.
Online speculation has long linked Dorsey to the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. That remains speculation, and nothing confirms it.
Giving and other roles
Dorsey joined the board of The Walt Disney Company on Dec. 24, 2013, and did not seek reelection in 2018. He sits on the board of the Berggruen Institute’s Governance Center.
His philanthropy has often come in large single gifts. In April 2020 he pledged about $1 billion in Square equity, roughly 28 percent of his wealth at the time, to COVID-19 relief and related causes. He gave $15 million to mayors testing guaranteed basic income programs, $10 million to Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research in August 2020, and $15 million toward India’s COVID-19 relief in May 2021. In January 2024 he gave $10 million to the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Forbes estimated his net worth at $5.9 billion as of February 2026.
He has lived in San Francisco’s Sea Cliff neighborhood since 2012 and practices meditation, including a ten-day Vipassanā course in late 2017. His honors include a spot on the TR35 list in 2008 and the Wall Street Journal’s Innovator of the Year award in 2012.
Source: Wikipedia, “Jack Dorsey” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dorsey).
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