The wild life of billionaire Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who has apologized for Elon Musk's layoffs and is known for eccentricities like eating one meal a day, and taking ice baths
Jack Dorsey cofounded Twitter in 2006 and the company made him a billionaire.
He's famous for his unusual life of luxury, including a daily fasting routine and regular ice baths.
He stepped down as Twitter CEO in November 2021 but continues to lead Block as its "Block Head."
From fighting armies of bots to quashing rumors about sending his beard hair to rapper Azealia Banks, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey leads an unusual life of luxury.
Dorsey has had a turbulent career in Silicon Valley. After cofounding 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.
He led Twitter through the techlash that has engulfed social media companies, testifying before Congress multiple times.
And Dorsey announced on November 29, 2021, he had stepped down as the CEO of Twitter. He continues to lead Block, where in April 2022 he changed his title from "CEO" to "Block Head." In May 2022, Dorsey officially stepped down from Twitter's board of directors amid Elon Musk's bid for the company, which became final in October 2022.
Shortly after the takeover, Musk called for mass layoffs at Twitter, impacting thousands of employees and an estimated 50% of the company's workforce. Dorsey subsequently apologized to "folks at Twitter past and present" in a tweet, claiming responsibility for the terminations because he "grew the company size too quickly."
Dorsey has provoked his fair share of controversy and criticism, extolling fasting and ice baths as part of his daily routine. His existence is not entirely spartan, however. Like some other billionaires, he owns a stunning house, dates models, and drives fast cars.
Scroll on to read more about the fabulous life of Jack Dorsey.
Rebecca Borison and Madeline Stone contributed reporting to an earlier version of this story.
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.
Source: Bio.
When he wasn't checking out specialty electronics stores or running a fantasy football league for his friends, Dorsey frequently attended punk-rock concerts.
These days Dorsey doesn't favour the spiky hairdo.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Like many of his fellow tech billionaires, Dorsey never graduated college.
He briefly attended the Missouri University of Science and Technology and transferred to New York University before calling it quits.
Source: Bio.
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.
Source: The Unofficial Stanford Blog
Fun fact: Jack Dorsey is also a licensed masseur.
He got his license in about 2002, before exploding onto the tech scene.
Sources: The Wall Street Journal
He got a job at a podcasting company called Odeo, where he met his future Twitter cofounders.
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."
Dorsey and his cofounders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, bought the Twitter domain name for roughly $7,000.
Dorsey took out his nose ring to look the part of a CEO. He was 30 years old.
A year later, Dorsey was already less hands-on at Twitter.
By 2008, Williams had taken over as CEO, and Dorsey transitioned to chairman of Twitter's board. Dorsey immediately got started on new projects. He invested in Foursquare and launched a payments startup called Square that lets small-business owners accept credit card payments through a smartphone attachment.
In 2011, Dorsey got the chance to interview US President Barack Obama in the first Twitter Town Hall.
Dorsey had to remind Obama to keep his replies under 140 characters, Twitter's limit at the time.
Source: Twitter
Twitter went public in November 2013, and within hours Dorsey was a billionaire.
In 2014 Forbes pegged Dorsey's net worth at $2.2 billion. On the day it was reported he was expected to resign, Bloomberg's Billionaires Index calculated his net worth at $12.3 billion.
It was revealed in a 2019 filing that Dorsey earned just $1.40 for his job as Twitter CEO the previous year.
The $1.40 salary actually represented a pay rise for Dorsey, who in previous years had refused any payment at all.
He's far from the only Silicon Valley mogul to have taken a measly salary - Mark Zuckerberg makes $1 a year as CEO of Facebook.
Source: Insider
He might have been worth more had he not given back 10% of his stock to Square.
This helped Square employees, giving them more equity and stock options. It was also helpful in acquiring online food-delivery startup Caviar.
With his newfound wealth, he bought a BMW 3 Series, but reportedly didn't drive it often.
"Now he's able to say, like, 'The BMW is the only car I drive, because it's the best automotive engineering on the planet,' or whatever," Twitter cofounder Biz Stone told The New Yorker in 2013.
Source: The New Yorker
He also reportedly paid $9.9 million for this seaside house on El Camino Del Mar in the exclusive Seacliff neighborhood of San Francisco.
The house has a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, which Dorsey views as a marvel of design.
Source: Insider
Before the pandemic, Dorsey said he worked from home one day a week.
In an interview with journalist Kara Swisher conducted over Twitter, Dorsey said he worked every Tuesday out of his kitchen.
He also told Kara Swisher that Elon Musk is his favorite Twitter user.
Dorsey said Musk's tweets are, "focused on solving existential problems and sharing his thinking openly."
He added that he enjoys all the "ups and downs" that come with Musk's sometimes unpredictable use of the site. Musk himself replied, tweeting his thanks and "Twitter rocks!" followed by a string of random emojis.
Both Musk and Dorsey are crypto enthusiasts, and appear to have developed a good public relationship.
Source: Insider
Facebook CEO and rival Mark Zuckerberg once served Jack Dorsey a goat he killed himself.
Dorsey told Rolling Stone about the meal, which took place in 2011. Dorsey said the goat was served cold, and that he personally stuck to salad.
Source: Rolling Stone
His eating habits have raised eyebrows.
Appearing on a podcast run by a health guru who previously said that vaccines caused autism, Dorsey said he eats one meal a day and fasts all weekend. He said the first time he tried fasting it made him feel like he was hallucinating.
"It was a weird state to be in. But as I did it the next two times, it just became so apparent to me how much of our days are centered around meals and how — the experience I had was when I was fasting for much longer, how time really slowed down," he said.
The comments drew fierce criticism from many who said Dorsey was normalizing eating disorders.
In a later interview with Wired, Dorsey said he eats seven meals a week, "just dinner."
Sources: Insider, The New Statesman
In the early days of Twitter, Dorsey aspired to be a fashion designer.
Dorsey would regularly don leather jackets and slim suits by Prada and Hermès, as well as Dior Homme reverse-collar dress shirts, a sort of stylish take on the popped collar.
More recently he favors edgier outfits, including the classic black turtleneck favored by Silicon Valley luminaries like Steve Jobs.
Sources: CBS News and The Wall Street Journal
He also re-introduced the nose-ring and grew a beard.
Dorsey seems to care less about looking the part of a traditional executive these days.
Singer Azealia Banks claimed to have been sent clippings of Dorsey's beard hair to fashion into a protective amulet, although Dorsey denied this happened.
In 2016, Banks posted on her now-deleted Twitter account that Dorsey sent her his hair, "in an envelope." Dorsey later told the HuffPo that the beard-posting incident never happened.
Dorsey frequently travels the world and shares his photos with his 6 million Twitter followers.
On his travels, Dorsey meets heads of state, including Japan's former Prime Minister Shinzō Abe.
Source: Twitter
Tweets about his vacation in Myanmar also provoked an outcry.
Dorsey tweeted glowingly about a vacation he took to Myanmar for his birthday in December 2018. "If you're willing to travel a bit, go to Myanmar," he said.
This came at the height of the Rohingya crisis, and Dorsey was attacked for his blithe promotion of the country — especially since social media platforms were accused of having been complicit in fuelling hatred towards the Rohingya.
Source: Insider
However, Dorsey says he doesn't care about "looking bad."
In a bizarre Huffington Post interview in 2019, Dorsey was asked whether Donald Trump — an avid tweeter — could be removed from the platform if he called on his followers to murder a journalist. Dorsey gave a vague answer which drew sharp criticism.
Following the interview's publication, Dorsey said he doesn't care about "looking bad."
"I care about being open about how we're thinking and about what we see," he added.
In September 2018, Jack Dorsey was grilled by lawmakers alongside Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
Dorsey and Sandberg were asked about election interference on Twitter and Facebook as well as alleged anti-conservative bias in social media companies.
Source: Insider
During the hearing, Dorsey shared a snapshot of his spiking heart rate on Twitter.
Dorsey was in the hot seat for several hours. His heart rate peaked at 109 beats per minute.
Source: Insider
Dorsey testified before Congress once again on October 28, 2020.
Dorsey appeared via videoconference at the Senate hearing on Section 230, a part of US law that protects internet companies from legal liability for user-generated content, as well as giving them broad authority to decide how to moderate their own platforms.
In prepared testimony ahead of the hearing, Dorsey said stripping back Section 230 would "collapse how we communicate on the Internet," and suggested ways for tech companies to make their moderation processes more transparent.
During the hearing, Dorsey once again faced accusations of anti-conservative bias
The accusations from Republican lawmakers focused on the way Twitter enforces its policies, particularly the way it has labelled tweets from President Trump compared to other world leaders.
Dorsey took the brunt of questions from lawmakers, even though he appeared alongside Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Source: Protocol
During the hearing, the length of Dorsey's beard drew fascination from pundits.
Some users referred to Dorsey's facial hair as his "quarantine beard," while others said it made him look like a wizard.
—rat king (@MikeIsaac) October 28, 2020
—Taylor Hatmaker (@tayhatmaker) October 28, 2020
"Jack Dorsey's beard is literally breaking Twitter's own face detection," posted cybersecurity blogging account @Swiftonsecurity.
—SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) October 28, 2020
Dorsey also addressed the way Twitter dealt with a dubiously sourced New York Post story about Hunter Biden.
When the New York Post published a report about Hunter Biden on October 14 that threw up red flags about sourcing, Twitter blocked users from sharing URLs citing its "hacked materials" policy.
Dorsey subsequently apologized publicly, saying it was wrong of Twitter to block URLs.
—jack (@jack) October 16, 2020
During the Senate hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz accused Twitter of taking the "unilateral decision to censor" the Post.
Dorsey said the Post's Twitter account would remain locked until it deleted its original tweet, but that updated policies meant it could tweet the same story again without getting blocked.
Source: Insider
Dorsey had to appear before another hearing on November 17 2020 — this time about how Twitter handled content moderation around the 2020 presidential election.
Dorsey was summoned alongside Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg by Republicans who were displeased with how the platforms had dealt with then-President Donald Trump's social media accounts.
Both CEOs defended their companies, saying they are politically neutral.
When he's not in Washington, Dorsey regularly hops in and out of ice baths and saunas.
Dorsey said in the "Tales of the Crypt" podcast that he started using ice baths and saunas in the evenings around 2016.
He will alternately sit in his barrel sauna for 15 minutes and then switch to an ice bath for three. He repeats this routine three times, before finishing it off with a one-minute ice bath.
He also likes to take an icy dip in the mornings to wake him up.
Source: CNBC
Dorsey's dating life has sparked intrigue. In 2018, he was reported to be dating Sports Illustrated model Raven Lyn Corneil.
Page Six reported in September 2018 that the pair were spotted together at the Harper's Bazaar Icons party during New York Fashion Week. Page Six also reported that Dorsey's exes included actress Lily Cole and ballet dancer Sofiane Sylve.
Source: Page Six
He's a big believer in cryptocurrency, frequently tweeting about its virtues.
In particular, Dorsey is a fan of Bitcoin, which he described in early 2019 as "resilient" and "principled." He told the "Tales of the Crypt" podcast in March that year that he was maxing out the $10,000 weekly spending limit on Square's Cash App buying up Bitcoin.
In October 2020 he slammed Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong for forbidding employee activism at the company, saying cryptocurrency is itself a form of activism.
—jack (@jack) September 30, 2020
Source: Insider, Insider and CNBC
Dorsey said Square was launching a new bitcoin business in summer 2021.
Dorsey announced the new venture in a tweet on July 15, 2021 and said its name was "TBD." It wasn't clear whether that was its actual name, or Dorsey hadn't decided on a name yet.
—jack (@jack) July 15, 2021
Dorsey said he hopes bitcoin can help bring about "world peace."
Dorsey appeared alongside Elon Musk and Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood during a panel called "The B Word" on July 2021. He said he loves the bitcoin community because it's "weird as hell."
"It's the only reason that I have a career — because I learned so much from people like who are building bitcoin today," Dorsey said.
At the end of 2019 Dorsey said he would move to Africa for at least three months in 2020.
Dorsey's announcement followed a tour of Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa. "Africa will define the future (especially the bitcoin one!). Not sure where yet, but I'll be living here for 3-6 months mid 2020," he tweeted.
Dorsey then came under threat of being ousted as Twitter CEO by activist investor Elliott Management.
Both Bloomberg and CNBC reported in late February 2020 that major Twitter investor Elliott Management — led by Paul Singer — was seeking to replace Dorsey.
Reasons given included the fact that Dorsey split his time between two firms by acting as CEO to both Twitter and financial tech firm Square, as well as his planned move to Africa.
Source: Insider
Tesla CEO and frequent Twitter user Elon Musk weighed in on the news, throwing his support behind Dorsey.
"Just want to say that I support @jack as Twitter CEO," Musk tweeted, adding that Dorsey has a good heart, using the heart emoji.
Source: Insider
Dorsey managed to strike a truce with Elliott Management.
Twitter announced on March 9, 2020 that it had reached a deal with Elliott Management which would leave Jack Dorsey in place as CEO.
The deal included a $1 billion investment from private equity firm Silver Lake, and partners from both Elliott Management and Silver Lake joined Twitter's board.
Patrick Pichette, lead independent director of Twitter's board, said he was "confident we are on the right path with Jack's leadership," but added that a new temporary committee would be formed to instruct the board's evaluation of Twitter's leadership.
In April 2020, Dorsey announced that he was forming a new charity fund that would help in global relief efforts amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Dorsey said he would pour $1 billion of his own Square equity into the fund, or roughly 28% of his total wealth at the time.
The fund, dubbed Start Small LLC, would first focus on helping in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, he said.
Dorsey said he would be making all transactions on behalf of the fund public in a spreadsheet.
In July 2020, hackers compromised 130 Twitter accounts in a bitcoin scam.
The accounts of high-profile verified accounts belonging to Bill Gates, Kim Kardashian West, and others were hacked, with attackers tweeting out posts asking users to send payment in bitcoin to fraudulent cryptocurrency addresses.
As a solution, Twitter temporarily blocked all verified accounts — those with blue check marks on their profiles — but the damage was done.
Elon Musk said he personally contacted Dorsey following the hack.
During a July 2020 interview with The New York Times, Musk said he had immediately called Dorsey after he learned about the hack.
"Within a few minutes of the post coming up, I immediately got texts from a bunch of people I know, then I immediately called Jack so probably within less than five minutes my account was locked," said Musk.
Source: The New York Times
In March 2021 Dorsey put his first-ever tweet up for auction.
As the craze for Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) gathered momentum, Dorsey announced he was auctioning his first tweet for charity. It was bought for $2.9 million by Hakan Estavi, chief executive at at Bridge Oracle.
Dorsey said proceeds from the auction would go to Give Directly's Africa response.
Twitter announced on November 29 Dorsey had stepped down as CEO.
CNBC was the first to report on Dorsey's expected resignation, citing unnamed sources.
Twitter confirmed the story the same day, announcing Chief Technology Officer Parag Agrawal would take over as CEO with immediate effect.
Dorsey posted on his Twitter account saying: "Not sure anyone has heard but, I resigned from Twitter."
In his tweet he included a screenshot of the email he sent to Twitter staff announcing his resignation.
—jack⚡️ (@jack) November 29, 2021
And in May 2022, his time on the board of directors officially came to an end, an anticipated move that coincides with the company's stockholder's meeting.
Two days after Dorsey stepped down as Twitter CEO, Square changed its name to Block.
"The name change creates room for further growth," the company said in a statement.
"Block references the neighborhood blocks where we find our sellers, a blockchain, block parties full of music, obstacles to overcome, a section of code, building blocks, and of course, tungsten cubes," it added.
The line about tungsten cubes was an apparent reference to a craze among crypto enthusiasts of paying as much as $3,500 for novelty tungsten cubes.
In April 2022, Dorsey changed his official title at Block from CEO to "Block Head."
The title change was made official in a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 20, 2022.
"There will be no changes in Mr. Dorsey's roles and responsibilities," the filing said.
Block's website was also updated to list his new title as Block Head.
Musk tweeted in response to the news using fire emojis to signal his approval for Dorsey's title.
—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 23, 2022
Musk officially added the title of "Technoking" to his role at Tesla in March 2021.
Dorsey said in an April 2022 tweet his "biggest regret" was Twitter shutting down Vine.
Dorsey replied to a Twitter user lamenting Vine's demise saying: "I know. Biggest regret," accompanied by a sad face emoji.
Twitter acquired short-form video app Vine in 2012 but shut it down in 2016.
In August 2022, Twitter's former head of security, Peiter Zatko, filed a whistleblower complaint with the SEC alleging the company participated in negligent security practices under Dorsey.
In his 84-page report and subsequent testimony, Zatko made a number of allegations against the company, including claims it had "egregious deficiencies" around security protocol and that Dorsey experienced a "drastic loss of focus" in his last year as CEO of Twitter.
In September 2022, Dorsey was deposed and questioned under oath as part of Elon Musk's legal battle with Twitter and his proposed $44 billion takeover.
Musk's team accused Twitter of misleading investors and intentionally "miscounting" spam accounts, Insider reported.
Later that month, private texts revealed Dorsey had tried to get Musk involved with Twitter a year prior to the Tesla CEO's $44 billion proposal.
In the texts, Dorsey explained why he left the company and said he previously pushed to get Musk involved with Twitter.
"A new platform is needed. It can't be a company. That's why I left," Dorsey wrote to Musk, adding he thinks Twitter should be an "open-sourced protocol" and "cant have an advertising model."
Dorsey also told Musk he had advocated for the Tesla CEO's addition to the Twitter board a year earlier, but the request was denied, which he said he thought "was completely stupid and backwards."
In October 2022, as Musk was finalizing his Twitter deal, Dorsey quietly launched a beta for his new social-media company, Bluesky Social.
The blockchain-based company's beta launch raked in 30,000 signups in two days. According to Bluesky's website, the company is intended to support "a new foundation for social networking which gives creators independence from platforms, developers the freedom to build, and users a choice in their experience."
After Musk ordered mass layoffs at Twitter after taking over in November 2022, Dorsey tweeted an apology: "I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation: I grew the company size too quickly. I apologize for that."
"Folks at Twitter past and present are strong and resilient," he wrote on Twitter. "They will always find a way no matter how difficult the moment. I realize many are angry with me."
He continued: "I am grateful for, and love, everyone who has ever worked on Twitter. I don't expect that to be mutual in this moment...or ever…and I understand."
Source: Insider
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