Are there tensions between tech billionaires Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey?
The two tech bros have always displayed their friendship despite the 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 revamping the microblogging website, considered the town square of our time.
"In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter," Dorsey, who now runs payment service company Block, wrote on April 25. "It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness."
From Praises ....
He went further by saying that "Elon’s goal of creating a platform that is “maximally trusted 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.
"Ok, then WHO is the most exciting influential on Twitter right now? BE SPECIFIC," journalist Kara Swisher asked Dorsey on February 2019.
"To me personally? I like how @elonmusk uses Twitter," Dorsey answered. "He’s focused on solving existential problems and sharing his thinking openly. I respect that a lot, and all the ups and downs that come with it #karajack."
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 drastic measure.
"I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation: I grew the company size too quickly. I apologize for that," Dorsey posted on Twitter.
... To Criticism
In addition, Dorsey remains a shareholder of Twitter after he rolled over about 18 million of his shares, or a 2.4% stake valued at $1 billion, according to a SEC filing, in the new company created by Musk, following the acquisition of the platform. This firm is X Holdings.
But the CEO of payments company Block (SQ), 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 become more fun since he took over.
"Twitter is fun 🚀 💫 ♥️," Musk tweeted last November and added that "It is so entertaining!"
Dorsey is not of this opinion and has just made it known following an outage encountered by the social network on Feb. 8. The outage, the biggest since Musk took over the platform on Oct. 27, left users unable to tweet. Some users had a message saying "You are over the daily limit for sending 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 trouble. We're aware and working to get this fixed.," 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 the decentralized platform Nostr on Feb.8
"Used to be when anything went down, people went to Twitter to talk about it. Now look," Dorsey, who donated 14 Bitcoins to Nostr, responded. Those 14 bitcoins are worth $304,416 at the current bitcoin price.
During the outage, Twitter users were able to schedule tweets a minute in advance. This also made Dorsey smile.
"Twitter went from real time to 1 minute delay," the billionaire blasted. "What's happening a minute from now."
Dorsey's criticism of Twitter is yet another sign that he is distancing himself from Musk. In December, the two billionaires clashed after Musk claimed that Twitter 1.0 didn't care about the safety of children on the platform.
"It is a crime that they refused to take action on child exploitation for years!" Musk chimed in on Dec. 9.
"This is false," Dorsey immediately pushed back.
"I don’t know what happened in past year," Dorsey said. "But to say we didn’t take action for years isn’t true. You can make all my emails public to verify. Company took away my access to email or I would."
