The Twitter co-founder appears to be distancing himself from the Tesla CEO he once endorsed.
Are there tensions between tech billionaires Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey?
The two tech bros have always shown their friendship despite criticism.
Dorsey has often praised Musk whenever the opportunity arises. Such was the case last April when Musk made his offer to acquire Twitter for $44 billion. Dorsey did not hesitate to declare that his billionaire friend was the only one capable of renewing the microblogging website, considered the town square of our time.
“In principle, I don’t think anyone should own or run Twitter,” Dorsey, who now runs payment services company Block, wrote on April 25. “It wants to be a public good at the protocol level, not a company. However, for the problem of it being a business, Elon is the singular solution that I trust. I am confident in your mission to spread the light of consciousness.”
Of Praises….
He went further to say that “Elon’s goal of creating a platform that is ‘maximum trustworthy and broadly inclusive’ is the right one.”
Dorsey was one of the few CEOs to back Musk amid strained relations with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“Okay, so WHO is the most exciting influencer on Twitter right now? BE SPECIFIC,” journalist Kara Swisher asked Dorsey in February 2019.
“For me personally? I like how @elonmusk uses Twitter,” Dorsey responded. “He focuses on solving existential problems and sharing his thinking openly. I have a lot of respect for him, and all the ups and downs that #karajack brings.”
Recently, when Musk cut half of Twitter’s workforce, or 3,750 jobs, in one day, Dorsey indirectly supported him by taking responsibility for the clampdown.
“I am responsible for why everyone is in this situation: I increased the size of the company too fast. I apologize for that,” Dorsey posted on Twitter.
… To criticism
In addition, Dorsey remains a Twitter shareholder after transferring about 18 million of his shares, or a 2.4% stake valued at $1 billion, according to an SEC filing, in the new company created by Musk, after the acquisition of the platform. . This firm is X Holdings.
But the CEO of the payment company Block (square) – Get a free reportA, formerly Square, doesn’t seem to like the changes Musk has made to Twitter. To be clear, Dorsey isn’t sold on Twitter 2.0, while Musk feels the platform has gotten more fun since he took over.
“Twitter is fun 🚀 💫 ♥️,” Musk tweeted last November, adding that “It’s so fun!”
Dorsey is not of this opinion and has just made it known after an interruption suffered by the social network on February 8. The outage, the biggest since Musk took over the platform on October 27, left users unable to tweet. Some users had a message saying “You are over the daily limit to send tweets.”
The company responded more than an hour and a half later.
“Twitter may not be working as expected for some of you. Sorry for the issue. We are aware and working to fix this,” the firm said.
Dorsey took the opportunity to mock Musk and Twitter.
“Twitter is down, and look where I went to talk about it,” a user posted on decentralized platform Nostr on Feb. 8.
“It used to be when something went wrong, people would go on Twitter to talk about it. Now look,” Dorsey, who donated 14 Bitcoins to Nostr, answered. Those 14 bitcoins are worth $304,416 at the current bitcoin price.
During the outage, Twitter users were able to schedule tweets up to a minute in advance. This also made Dorsey smile.
“Twitter went from real time to 1 minute late,” criticized the billionaire. “What’s going on in a minute?”
Dorsey’s criticism of Twitter is another sign that he is distancing himself from Musk. In December, the two billionaires clashed after Musk claimed that Twitter 1.0 did not care about the safety of children on the platform.
“It is a crime that they have refused to take action against child exploitation for years!” Musk intervened on December 9.
“This is false,” Dorsey responded immediately.
“I don’t know what happened last year,” Dorsey said. “But to say we didn’t take action for years is not true. You can make all my emails public to verify. The company took away my email access or they would.”
