The Former CEO Will Be Leaving The Twitter Board In The Coming Weeks.
This change is a big deal for the app as Dorsey was one of the app’s founders. As Elon Musk prepares to take over, it seems like a rally of senior employees are flying the nest.
Within the last two weeks, they have lost:
- Kayvon Beykpour, Consumer product leader (4 years)
- Bruce Falck, Head of revenue product (5 years)
- Ilya Brown, a VP of product management (6 years)
- Katrina Lane, VP of Twitter Service (1 year)
- Max Schmeiser, head of data science (2 years)
The news of Dorsey’s departure doesn’t come as a surprise as he announced he would be stepping down as the CEO in November. The plan at that point was for Parag Agrawal to take over so Dorsey was planning on staying up until May to assist the new CEO on his onboarding. Of course, this plan has been entirely uprooted but Dorsey’s decision remains the same.
As Elon Musk sets the course to take over Twitter, the new CEO isn’t stepping into his role as wholeheartedly as he should. Musk appears to have been very involved in conspiracies rather than his new role and on May 13th he announced that his takeover would be put on hold as he waits for more data from Twitter on its fake profile count, which encompasses 5% of active users.
Twitter has responded to this saying that the process is not able to be put ‘on hold’ and that the transfer is going ahead as planned. Musk’s rebuttal to this was that he ‘won’t pay full price for something that’s not what he believed he was purchasing’
Despite the controversy, it seems as though Dorsey is in full support of Musk noting multiple times that he believes Musk will ‘save’ the company.
Within a tweet he noted:
‘Elon’s goal of creating a platform that is “maximally trusted and broadly inclusive” is the right one. This is also @paraga’s goal, and why I chose him. Thank you both for getting the company out of an impossible situation. This is the right path…I believe it with all my heart.’
As Twitter, although still a large social media presence, hasn’t been performing as well in recent years, maybe the absence of the founders from the board will be a good thing. Hopefully, despite this, the new leadership team will take into account what made Twitter great in the first place and avoid mistakes that have been made in the past.
Finally, for our previous #SocialShort, click here.