Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey will step down as the tech company’s chief executive.
Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s CTO, will succeed Dorsey as the company’s new CEO, effective immediately. Twitter announced the news Monday, with the company’s board unanimously approving of Agrawal as Dorsey’s replacement. Dorsey will remain on Twitter’s board of directors through his current term, which runs into 2022.
Once his term ends, Dorsey told staff in an email (with the subject line “Fly”) that he will leave the company entirely. Current board member Bret Taylor will become the company’s chairman.
Dorsey said in a statement:
“I’ve decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders. My trust in Parag as Twitter’s CEO is deep. His work over the past 10 years has been transformational. I’m deeply grateful for his skill, heart, and soul. It’s his time to lead,”
More recently the company has stepped up the pace of development, launching a subscription service, Twitter Blue, the audio service Twitter Spaces, and other products. Agrawal has been viewed internally as a driving force behind those product pushes.
“The world is watching us right now, even more than they ever have before,” Agrawal was observed in his Monday email. “Lots of people are going to have lots of different views and opinions about today’s news. It is because they care about Twitter and our future, and it’s a signal that the work we do here matters.”
Dorsey also made the call to ban former President Donald Trump from the platform following the riot at the Capitol in January, though he added that “this moment in time might call for this dynamic, but over the long term it will be destructive to the noble purpose and ideals of the open internet.”
Known for his casual and laid back style and futurism-laden commentary on his vision for the world, Dorsey in more recent years has shifted his focus to cryptocurrency, and specifically Bitcoin.
Dorsey told analysts over the summer that the cryptocurrency will become “hugely important” for the company adding that he was “focusing on the use case of the internet having a native currency, and Bitcoin is the best candidate for that role. If the Internet has a native currency, a global currency, we are able to move so much faster.”
Dorsey would go on to sell his first tweet, “just setting up my twttr” as an NFT, raising nearly $3 million for charity in doing so.
Still, that focus on crypto, which has obvious implications for his other company, Square, also saw Twitter go through some rocky patches. In its last quarterly earnings report, the company missed its Wall Street expectations on revenue and earnings per share and swung to a loss due to a lawsuit.
The Twitter stock rose by more than 10 percent in the minutes after CNBC’s David Faber first reported that Dorsey was expected to step down.
