Jack Dorsey may have left Twitter recently, but he’s still developing a philosophy for the company. In response to a tweet asking him about his biggest regret, which was accompanied by rumours of political bias on the platform, the company’s co-founder and former chief executive made a great point, that he wished the company had never existed.
“The biggest problem and my biggest regret is that it became a company,” Dorsey said on Twitter.
If you haven’t heard Dorsey before, the idea that Twitter shouldn’t be a company may sound strange. But he’s not saying the project shouldn’t exist, he’s saying that if he could rewrite history, he would (allegedly) lead Twitter to a deal, not a company.”[ I ] don’t believe that any individual or institution should own social media, or a broader media company,” Dorsey tweeted in April. “It should be an open and verifiable agreement. Everything is a step in that direction.
Sure, Dorsey definitely made money when he went public on Twitter in 2013, but Tech billionaires always seem to have these hypothetical regrets, don’t they? To his credit, at least he’s doing something worthwhile with a lot of cash.
In response to a more reasonable follow-up question from Jane Manchun Wong, Dorsey reiterated that he wants Twitter to be an open agreement, not a company. The company, of course, has been trying to please investors, chart a course for growth and even provide a precise definition of its mission for years, even as it has become a real-time utility for spreading information to many people, including world leaders, all agree that the basic.
If you’ve been making money off these decisions for years and you’re still criticizing your own decisions, is that a Monday morning quarterback? Whatever it is, it may not have been very productive, but still, Twitter’s Shaggy Master of mystery continues to tweet, even as the rest of Twitter browses through the company’s most tumultuous phase.
But Dorsey’s dream is not dead, just more likely to be realized through a project parallel to Twitter itself. Even as the bluebird gets stuck on Ellon Musk’s self-driving roller coaster, Twitter’s open-source subsidiary, Bluesky, is still trying to realize its dream of decentralization, its plans for a fully open social networking protocol seem to have remained intact amid the chaos.
Despite his lofty ideals, Dorsey backed Musk’s offer earlier this year. But if what@Jake values most is the transparency and open environment of the social platform he co-founded, then to say the least, a technology executive notorious for misleading statements, concealing company data, and dumping NDA around is an odd partner. Of course, Dorsey would have made hundreds of millions of dollars from the deal if it had gone through, but with musk and Twitter in court in October, all that is up in the air.