Throughout Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition saga last year, Jack Dorsey was a vocal supporter and powerful ally. The Twitter co-founder and twice CEO went as far as calling Musk the “singular solution” he trusted to lead the social media company. Fast forward a year, however, and Dorsey has turned 180 degrees and admitted everything at Twitter “went south” after Musk’s takeover.
The Twitter cofounder has also picked a different platform to share his thoughts this time. In a post on April 28 on Bluesky, an invite-only social media platform he helped start in 2021, Dorsey said he no longer believes Musk is the right person to lead Twitter and that he should have walked away from the acquisition last year.
“It all went south,” Dorsey wrote. “But it happened and all we can do now is build something to avoid that ever happening again.”
Twitter’s board signed an agreement to sell the company to Musk for $44 billion on April 24, 2022. At the time, Dorsey was a board member of Twitter and owned 2.4 percent of the company. He stepped down from the board in May 2022 but retained his equity stake. Musk dissolved Twitter’s board in October after the acquisition was complete and Twitter became a private company.
Musk’s drastic restructuring shattered Dorsey’s confidence
Since his takeover, Musk has ordered a series of aggressive cost-cutting measures, including laying off 75 percent of Twitter’s employees, canceling office perks and stopping paying vendors. He has also implemented rapid product changes, such as launching a subscription service and charging for Twitter’s signature blue-check verification marks.
Many of the employees Musk fired, including Twitter’s former CEO Parag Agrawal, were hired when Dorsey was at the helm. In November 2022, Dorsey apologized to affected employees on Twitter. “I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation: I grew the company size too quickly. I apologize for that,” he said in a tweet.
Later that month, Dorsey and Musk engaged in Dorsey and Musk engaged in a fiery exchange on Twitter over how the company should be managed. The two hashed out their disagreements on everything from product branding to high-level missions like whether Twitter should strive to be an accurate source of information.
Musk and Dorsey share a passion for novel tech concepts like blockchain, Web3 and NFT. In a tweet last May, Musk said he is a fan of Dorsey. In another post in December, Musk said Dorsey “has a pure heart” and many bad decisions at Twitter were made without Dorsey’s approval.
Musk hasn’t publicly responded to Dorsey’s latest criticism of his management of Twitter. In an interview on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” that aired on April 28, Musk said Twitter was very close to bankruptcy when he took over so he had no choice but to implement those drastic changes.
Dorsey is moving to rival social media platforms
Since his public spat with Musk in November, Dorsey has been gradually moving away from Twitter to other platforms. He has tweeted only five times this year so far, with his last tweet posted on Jan. 31.
Meanwhile, Dorsey has been active on rival social media platforms, including Nostr and Bluesky. Both are decentralized, open-source platforms and count Dorsey as an investor. A decentralized social media platform allows users to customize their algorithms and feeds using its underlying technology. Both Nostr and Bluesky are still in their beta stage, so customization features are not fully available yet.
Nostr is a platform particularly popular among Bitcoin enthusiasts. It claims it has attracted more than one million users since launch. Bluesky’s main appeal is its invite-only design. Some of the big names that have joined in recent weeks include New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, supermodel Chrissy Teigen, and prominent journalists from the New York Times and CNN.