‘Everyone at Twitter hates him now’

In the league of Silicon Valley legends, Jack Dorsey — the Twitter co-founder who stepped down as CEO a year ago this month — has long had a reputation as the cool, bearded hippie who likes to go and meditate in the middle of nowhere. . dating patterns and fasting.

Now, barely a week since his friend, the billionaire businessman Elon Musk, created Twitter for $44 billion, Dorsey, 46, is launching a social media company called Bluesky: a new kind of decentralized platform that promises to give users and developers more autonomy. More than 30,000 subscribers have already registered, the company posted on Twitter on October 20.

Bluesky, which is in beta testing, was commissioned by Dorsey as a response to some of the problems he saw on Twitter.

While some doubt he has a genuine interest in another social media company, those who know the unmarried, childless Dorsey say he has sharp elbows in addition to brains, and that his life and career after Twitter should not be underestimated. . He currently has a net worth of less than $4 billion.

In an apparent show of confidence in Musk’s takeover, Dorsey, who also founded the cash payments company Block, opted to roll over his $1 billion stake — 18 million shares — in Twitter instead of cashing out.

But, the sources said, there is discontent among Twitter employees — half of whom are said to be expected to lose their jobs under Musk.

“Jack is hated on Twitter,” a source familiar with the situation told The Post. “They blame Jack for what happened with Elon taking over the company. para [Agrawal, the recently-ousted head of Twitter] and the board thinks he’s this really bad character.

“Just look at the stock price before Elon bought it. It was around $37 and had been flat for about ten years. The company didn’t grow because Jack was having fun on his plane with these models,” the source said. “But no one wrote about what a disaster the company was because everyone idolizes Dorsey and thinks he’s the next Steve Jobs .”

Representatives for Dorsey at Square and Bluesky did not respond to requests for comment.

Dorsey may not be a lightning rod for controversy like Musk, Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates, or perceived as socially awkward like Mark Zuckerberg, but it would be a mistake to think he’s any less Machiavellian or megalomaniac than the rest of them, some sources who know. Dorsey told The Post.

“He was at one point the lowest person in the room at Twitter and then, because he wanted to be the most important person in the room, he was — and he ended up being the CEO,” said author Nick Bilton, who spent time with Dorsey for Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power Friendship and Betrayal, his 2014 book.

“He had three co-founders who have kind of been erased from Twitter’s history, both publicly and financially. When he left last time, he blamed other people for the problems on Twitter. Even though he was on the board and was the CEO! He is highly skilled in boardroom politics and in fending off coups against him.”

And he has plenty of people in his corner who predict a great post-Twitter career in his future.

“Jack is not hot-tempered or hot-tempered,” said Nik Yakovenko, who worked at Twitter under Dorsey from 2015 to 2017. “He’s a calm person. Very [Silicon Valley bosses] they are not calm. He’s a little more cerebral. He’s also a lot more honest than you think. He is not that interested in money. He loves nature and outdoors and really likes to do blockchain stuff. It remains to be seen what will happen to Bluesky. It’s about decentralizing social media networks in the future to give users more autonomy.”

Like many of his tech big brothers, Dorsey didn’t stand out during his childhood, where he suffered from a stutter and had cool hobbies like studying maps and trains and listening to police scanners.

“I loved couriers,” he once said. “You had this transfer of physical information across the city and the world. Someone who takes the package, puts it in a bag, goes somewhere, takes it out of the bag, gives it to someone else. I thought that was so cool. I wanted to map it, to see that flow on a big screen.”

He grew up in modest circumstances in St. Louis, Mo. where his father, Tim, was a medical device engineer and his mother, Marcia, a homemaker. The family recently renovated Marcia Dorsey’s childhood home.

Her Twitter bio reads: “@jack’s mom… Does that make me Twitter’s grandma?”

Despite dropping out of college, Dorsey’s early efforts creating dispatch software for taxi companies led him to plan to broadcast his status in real time to his friends—an idea that served as the final building block. for Twitter, formed in 2006.

Along the way, Dorsey briefly became a licensed massage therapist and dabbled in modeling and fashion design.

In 2019, he detailed 11 of his “wellness habits,” which include morning ice baths and saunas, eating just one meal a day and often fasting on weekends, two hours of meditation a day, and a walk daily five-mile commute to work.

“Dorsey is a rarity in Silicon Valley,” Bilton said. “Jack is more charismatic than most of them. Having a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg is talking to a chatbot. Most of them are strange and you think, he did someone in a laboratory and he ran away and they became the CEO. But with Jack you realize there might be a real human being out there somewhere.”

Dorsey’s charisma — and massive bank account — may be why he’s been linked to swimsuit models Flora Carter and Raven Lyn Corneil, yoga instructor Kate Greer, fashion model Lilly Cole and “Boss Bitch” author Nicole Lapin .

But the relationship did not last.

“He bought Raven Lyn an $8 million home in the Hollywood Hills in 2019, but she still broke up with him,” an insider told The Post. “It was like he was too weird to put up with despite his money.”

A Silicon Valley insider said Dorsey keeps a low profile. He first bought a $10 million home overlooking San Francisco Bay in the city’s Seacliff area in 2012, and then bought the property next door for $21 million in late 2018.

“Jack always seems to be a harbinger of things to come,” the insider told The Post. “His diet, biohacking, fasting – he’s always one of the first to do things. What he does that seems strange will be seen as fashionable and cool three years later… But he does not participate in social networks or galas. He stays away and stays with his guy pack.”

However, his current pack of friends would do well to watch their friend like a hawk.

“Jack doesn’t talk to any of them [his three] More co-founders of Twitter,” said another insider of Dorsey’s longtime friends Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Noah Glass. “You can be sure they don’t buy into the public BS narrative that Dorsey is a literal monk CEO who walks the earth. He’s like everyone else, just trying to fool everyone else for his own good.”

The Post reached out to Stone, Williams and Glass.