How much will Jack Dorsey make from selling Twitter to Elon Musk?

Tech entrepreneur founded and still owns 2% stake in social media platform

Graeme Massie

Monday 25 April 2022 18:49 BST

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Twitter 'set to accept' Elon Musk's offer to purchase the company

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Throughout Twitter’s often controversial existence, former CEO Jack Dorsey has been the face and essential identity of the company.

Mr Dorsey, who came to the tech world after twice dropping out of university and becoming a certified masseuse, founded the social media platform in 2006 with Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams.

The Missouri-born entrepreneur first became a billionaire in 2012, and still owns around two per cent of Twitter, which is subject to Elon Musk’s all-cash offer of $43bn. So, if the deal ultimately gets over the line as heavily predicted on Monday by insiders, Mr Dorsey would earn around $860m from his stake in the company.

But despite the Tesla boss circling the company as its prospective new owner, it is not Twitter that has propelled Mr Dorsey into the ranks of Silicon Valley’s newly-minted billionaires.

For an estimated 88 per cent of his $6.92bn worth, which places him 341th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index on Monday, comes from an 11 per cent stake in credit card payment company Square.

Mr Dorsey founded the fin-tech company in 2009 with Jim McKelvey and had the CEO role, as well as the CEO role at Twitter, a rare double responsibility that he has in common with Mr Musk, who runs Tesla at the same time as SpaceX.

He lost his CEO role at Twitter in 2008, but returned to the job in 2015, the same year that Square went public.

Last November, Twitter announced that Mr Dorsey was stepping down as the CEO of the company to be replaced by the company’s chief technology officer Parag Agrawal.

He still remains the CEO, president and chairman of the board of Square, which rebranded as Block last December.

As of Monday, Square had a value of $61.65bn, and had a revenue of $17.7bn in 2021.

In 2020 Mr Dorsey announced that he would put $1bn of his Square equity into Start Small LLC, which would first focus on fighting the coronavirus pandemic.

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