Who is Jack Dorsey?
Dorsey's first foray into the world of tech was as a teen in the 1980s
Billionaire Jack Dorsey wears many hats — the 43-year-old is CEO of both Twitter and Square, two wildly successful tech companies, after jumpstarting his career by developing software as a teen.
The eccentric CEO, who has testified in front of Congress while wearing a nose ring, lives in California near Twitter's San Francisco headquarters. He has a net worth of $6 billion, according to Forbes.
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Dorsey's first foray into the world of tech was as a teen in the 1980s. His family bought their first computer and he developed taxi-dispatching software from their home in St. Louis, according to a 2011 Vanity Fair profile.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on "Foreign Influence Operations and Their Use of Social Media Platforms" on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
“I wanted to play with how the city worked, so I could see it,” Dorsey told Vanity Fair.
Taxi cab companies used the teenaged Dorsey's program, and as an adult he created an internet company that expanded the idea to couriers and ambulances, according to the Encyclopaedia Brittanica.
But Dorsey's real success came with his idea for a messaging platform that evolved into Twitter with the help of his friends/co-founders Evan Williams and Christopher Stone. Dorsey posted the first-ever tweet in 2006 and served as its CEO until 2008, when Williams took over for a short time.
“It was like being punched in the stomach,” Dorsey said according to Vanity Fair.
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Dorsey remained involved with Twitter but launched Square, a mobile payment company now worth billions, in 2009. Dorsey then returned to Twitter as CEO in 2015 and is now CEO of two major companies.
Twitter has been embroiled in controversy recently after attaching fact-check warnings to some of the president's tweets.
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After the warnings, President Trump issued an executive order in May that could remove some of social media platforms' liability protections if they engage in "selective censorship" harmful to national discourse.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act states that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."