The secrets of Jack Dorsey’s fortune after leaving his position on Twitter

Jack Dorsey resigned as CEO of Twitter with an estimated fortune of $ 11.8 billion, nearly ten times what he was worth less than a decade ago.

However, according to a Forbes article, “you don’t have Twitter to thank for that,” as “most of Dorsey’s net worth – 88% of his estimated fortune – is tied to his nearly 11% stake in Square, a financial technology company that enables credit card payments to small businesses and owns the mobile money transfer application CashApp”.

In fact, according to Forbes, Square’s share value “has more than tripled since January 2020 to approximately $ 213 per share, driven by timely acquisitions and growth in CashApp, which added some 12 million users in 2020”.

Remember that Dorsey, 45, co-founded Square in 2009 with Jim McKelvey and immediately took on the role of CEO after co-founding Twitter. After being fired as CEO of Twitter in 2008, Dorsey returned to the job in 2015, the same year Square went public.

For six years, Dorsey ran both companies simultaneously, “a rare feat even for the work-obsessed Silicon Valley titans.” The article recalls that Elon Musk is also the CEO of two companies, electric car maker Tesla and rocket firm SpaceX.

“The hard work has paid off for Dorsey financially. He became a billionaire for the first time and entered the Forbes ranking of the 400 richest Americans in the fall of 2012, with an estimated net worth of $ 1.1 billion based on his share of Twitter, which had not yet gone public.”

Thus, his assets “rose to $ 6.3 billion in October 2018, before falling to $ 2.6 billion in April 2020 when the pandemic briefly hit the stock market”.

However, “the real wealth came during the subsequent market recovery, as, between April 2020 and November 2021, Dorsey has added more than $ 9 billion to his net worth, which peaked at $ 14.9 billion during last year October”.

What’s more, Dorsey still owns a piece of Twitter, worth about $ 850 million, and his fortune increased by $ 59 million after Monday’s announcement, as the rise in Square’s share price offset the 2.3% drop in Twitter’s shares.

However, “Twitter critics have denounced the company’s lack of growth under Dorsey’s leadership: when it went public in 2013, Twitter had about 100 million daily active users. In the last quarter, Twitter registered 211 million “monetizable” daily active users, which makes it much smaller than Instagram, Facebook or TikTok”.

They have also questioned the role of Twitter in allowing “the spread of disinformation online, and the controversy surrounded Twitter’s decision to ban then-President Donald Trump from accessing its platform after the January 6 riots in the United States Capitol”.

In this regard, it should be recalled that, in March, the United States Congress questioned Dorsey, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai “on issues ranging from misinformation about online vaccines to children’s screen time”.

Forbes recalled that Dorsey dropped out of college twice, was a certified masseuse and amateur fashion designer before turning to technology and “has opted for a unique approach to multi-million dollar philanthropy,” according to this note from Eliza Haverstock.