Jack Dorsey steps down as Twitter CEO; Parag Agarwal will take over
Jack Dorsey steps down as Twitter's CEO; Parag Agarwal will take over
Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, announced his resignation as the microblogging platform's Chief Executive Officer via his Twitter account on Wednesday. He also revealed that Parag Agarwal, the former Chief Technical Officer, will take over as the company's CEO.
I'm not sure if anyone was listening, but
Earlier this year, Twitter announced a new product innovation initiative called Fleets and Spaces, as part of its ongoing efforts to achieve its goal of doubling annual revenue by 2023. Twitter hopes to have 315 million daily active users by the end of 2023, all of whom will be able to be monetized.
Early in the day, shares of the microblogging platform rose by nine percent, while shares of Square Inc (SQ.N) rose by three percentage points. In the hours leading up to the announcement, trading in shares of the social media platform and Square was suspended.
The statement by Jack describes a founder-led business as "extremely limiting" and "a single point of failure." Also stated was his intention to remain on the board of directors until approximately May in order to assist the new CEO with the transition.
Jack Dorsey as Twitter CEO
Dorsey was the CEO of the social media behemoth from 2004 until his retirement in 2008. Because of his inability to resolve a persistent outage issue that caused the service to crash on a regular basis, Evan Williams, a technology entrepreneur, and Fred Wilson, a prominent board member, came to the conclusion that Dorsey was unfit to lead the company and resigned from his position. Jack was reinstated as CEO of Twitter in 2015, following the resignation of former CEO Dick Costolo.
After a major investor, Elliott Management Corp., claimed that Dorsey was paying too little attention to Twitter while also running Square Inc., a payments processing company, Dorsey faced calls to resign in early this year.
As a result of the threat, the entrepreneur was forced to postpone his planned temporary relocation to Africa until further notice. It was not difficult to deduce that he was referring to his struggle to keep his job at Twitter when he stated that he was doing so because of the coronavirus threat and "everything else that was going on."
The crisis was avoided by Dorsey, who appointed Elliott and its ally, the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, to the board of directors of the social media company Twitter. Additionally, a $1 billion investment from Silver Lake was included in the transaction, which will be combined with cash on hand to fund a $2 billion share repurchase program over the course of several years.
Twitter's future
Parag Agarwal, a former engineer at Twitter, will take over as the company's new CEO and president. Agarwal has been with Twitter for more than a decade, and he has served as the company's Chief Technology Officer since 2017. He was in charge of the strategies for artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The CEO of the company, Jack Dorsey, stated that Agarwal has been his preferred candidate to lead the company "for quite some time," owing to his "in-depth understanding of the business and its needs." The revenue and membership targets for the platform will be Agrawal's primary responsibility in his new position as CEO.
Besides that, the new leadership will have access to ongoing discussions between the social media behemoth and Nigeria, where Twitter is still illegal. Perhaps this is all that is required to re-establish the platform in the country in its current state.
