30 Not-So-Known Facts About Jack Dorsey You Might Have Missed Before

Jack Dorsey, one among the top technology entrepreneurs in the world, is prominently known for co-founding Twitter. His journey in the technology world has been a hell of a ride, facing countless hardships throughout his tenure. In the year 2013, he was considered by Forbes the world's most eligible bachelor. He was awarded with the "Innovator of the Year Award" for technology, by The Wall Street Journal in the year 2012. Here are some really interesting facts about the entrepreneur that will blow your mind:

 
JD Lasica from Pleasanton, CA, US, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
1.  In February 2017, Dorsey and Executive Chairman Omid Kordestani matched a $530,000 donation to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) raised by Twitter staffers. Their match brought the total donation to $1.59 million.
2.  Dorsey is a vocal Bitcoin advocate, and has spoken at Bitcoin conferences such as "The B Word," and has often said that if he was not working on Twitter and Square, he would be working on Bitcoin.
3.  Dorsey is a board member of the Berggruen Institute's Governance Center. He gives advice in a chapter of Tim Ferriss' book Tools of Titans.
4.  In September 2018, he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee alongside Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg about meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
5.  He met privately with U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House and discussed Trump's concerns that Twitter had limited or removed some of his Twitter followers, and those of conservatives.
6.  Jack Patrick Dorsey was born on November 19, 1976 to Tim Dorsey and Marcia Dorsey in St. Louis, Missouri. He was raised Catholic in Cincinnati.
7.  His uncle is a Catholic priest. He is of part Italian descent on his mother's side, and part Irish descent on his father's side.
8.  His father worked for a company that developed mass spectrometers, while his mother was a homemaker.
9.  He attended Bishop DuBourg High School, before enrolling at the University of Missouri–Rolla in 1995, where he attended two-plus years.
10.  At the age of 14, he became interested in dispatch routing, and went on to create open-source software in the area of dispatch logistics, some of which is still used by taxicab companies.


David Shankbone, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

11.  In 1997, he transferred to New York University, but dropped out after two years, one semester short of graduating.
12.  It was during his time in New York University, that he came up with the idea that eventually became the most popular social media site Twitter.
13.  He moved to California, while he was working on dispatching as a programmer. He started his company in Oakland to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the Web in the year 2000.
14.  Around this time, he had a number of ideas for other projects that included networks of medical devices and a "frictionless service market."
15.  Inspired in part by LiveJournal and AOL Instant Messenger, he came up with the idea for a Web-based realtime status/short message communication service.
16.  With the first implementations of instant messaging, he approached Odeo, which at the time happened to be interested in text messaging.
17.  Dorsey and Biz Stone decided that SMS text suited the status-message idea, and built a prototype of Twitter in about two weeks.
18.  Many Odeo users were attracted by the idea, which eventually led to the investment from Evan Williams, a co-founder of that firm in 2005, who had left Google after selling Pyra Labs and Blogger.
19.  Williams, Stone and Noah Glass co-founded Obvious Corporation, which then spun off Twitter, Inc., with Dorsey as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO).
20.  As CEO, he saw the startup through two rounds of funding by venture capitalists. He chose the improvement of uptime as top priority, as the service began to grow in popularity.


(CC) Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com / bub.blicio.us

21.  On October 16, 2008, Williams took over as CEO, while Dorsey became chairman of the board, following which he joined several State Department delegations, including a trip to Iraq in April 2009, led by Jared Cohen.
22.  On March 28, 2011, he returned to Twitter as executive chairman after Dick Costolo replaced Williams as CEO. With Costolo’s resignation, he was named permanent CEO on October 5, 2015.
23.  Dorsey was briefly suspended from his own Twitter account with 3.9 million followers, on November 22, 2016. The account was restored shortly, following which he tweeted that the suspension was due to an "internal mistake."
24.  His personal Twitter account was allegedly breached for nearly an hour by a group calling itself the Chuckling Squad, posting and retweeting numerous racist tweets, on August 30, 2019.
25.  On February 29, 2020, it was announced that activist hedge fund Elliott Management led by billionaire Paul Singer was looking to oust Dorsey and nominate four directors to Twitter's board, including Elliott's senior portfolio manager Jesse Cohn.
26.  He announced his departure from the role of Twitter's CEO on November 29, 2021, with his resignation, taking effect immediately.
27.  He was replaced by the company's former CTO Parag Agrawal, who took over as CEO effective immediately. Dorsey will continue to lead as the CEO of Block, Inc.
28.  In May 2021, he donated $15 million in his personal capacity to support relief efforts in India's COVID-19 second wave. The three NGOs were Care ($10 million), Aid India ($2.5 million), and Sewa International ($2.5 million).
29.  He, along with co-founder Jim McKelvey, developed a small business platform to accept debit and credit card payments on a mobile device called Square, released in May 2010.
30.  Dorsey is the CEO of Square, Inc., and he owns 24.4 percent of the company. In March 2020, the FDIC permitted Square to open a bank, following which plans to launch Square Financial Services was announced in 2021.
31.  Jack Dorsey Net Worth: $1.3 Billion