Elon Musk is the new and proud owner of Twitter. There’s nothing changing the fact that he indeed took a public company private again. While Musk is enjoying his new purchase and parading around the premises firing top management, one key Twitter founder is still around. Jack Dorsey, who made the first tweet on the platform, owns a 2.4% stake in the company. The stake might sound small to you, but it translates to over a billion dollars in Twitter’s current worth.
Instead of selling his shares, he reinvested them into the company he founded 16 years back. Elon Musk would be very happy with this decision because he wouldn’t have to arrange for 1 billion when he is already borrowing billions.
Jack Dorsey’s decision is not surprising
After Elon Musk began showing interest in buying the company, Jack Dorsey was sure that he wouldn’t sell and instead reinvest in his company. Despite having a tiny stake, he is still a billionaire after the $44 billion acquisition. But money isn’t the only driving factor behind this decision. According to many news publications, Dorsey is more than an acquaintance of Musk.
Business Insider reported that the lawsuit filed by Twitter revealed some important communication that took place between Musk and Dorsey. He knew that Musk was moving to acquire the company and even discussed the possibility. Finally, Musk made his move and presented a generous offer that even the shareholders couldn’t refuse.
However, Musk did back out of the deal after a month. He noticed that Twitter was brimming with spam accounts and asked for a report on that. Twitter did provide statistics, but he didn’t believe them and said that the figure would be up to 20%. After that, he backed out of the deal, and Twitter filed a lawsuit against him on top of other lawsuits by investors accusing Musk of manipulating Twitter shares.
Now all that is over, Jack Dorsey is looking forward to a new Twitter, the brainchild of Elon Musk. In a typical billionaire fashion, Musk proposed some wild changes to the platform, including a subscription to show the verified account badge. Stephen King wasn’t happy with the proposition and said that he would leave the platform and not pay a dime for the badge.
