Twitter: A Wall Street–Silicon Valley culture clash
@Jack is keeping his job at Twitter, but it’s likely to be temporary, said Peter Kafka in Vox.com. Paul Singer’s Elliott Management, perhaps Wall Street’s most feared investor, disclosed last week that it had bought $1 billion worth of Twitter shares, and said it “wanted to replace Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.” Dorsey has been an “inviting target for critics of every variety.” Conservatives complain that “the service unfairly silences them.” Liberals bemoan its “toxic environment.” And investors wonder about a plan by Dorsey, whose eccentric habits include ice baths and frequents fasts, to move to Africa for six months and run Twitter remotely. This week, instead of the expected shareholder battle, Dorsey and Singer “announced a temporary ceasefire” that gives Singer seats on Twitter’s board and promises that Twitter’s financial performance will improve. In effect, Dorsey now gets what big companies call “a performance improvement plan”—a set of goals that nobody really expects him to meet and that give Singer “the tools he’ll need to boot” the CEO.
It won’t be a surprise if Dorsey’s time is soon up, said Emily Dreyfuss in Protocol.com. His apology tour began in 2018, when it was obvious that he had lost control of the company he co-founded, letting it become a megaphone for harassers and bots. “The Nazis remain. The bots remain. Profits remain small. Dorsey remains sorry.” Jack Dorsey is “one of the more thoughtful, responsive, and earnest entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley,” said Kara Swisher in
The New York Times. None of that really matters. Dorsey’s silent meditation retreats and other quirks are also “exactly nobody’s business.” Really this is about money. The reason that Dorsey finds himself under assault now is that even as Twitter’s importance has grown in the “global conversation,” he’s found no way to capitalize on that. “Twitter is a jewel,” and Dorsey has been able to make little of it.
There’s a “cultural clash” here between Wall Street and the tech industry, said Matt Levine in Bloomberg.com. If you are the founder of a high-profile tech company, your role is “to be a charismatic kooky visionary.” You’re practically not doing your job unless you also “run a spaceship company, or have a side project involving curing death or saving humanity from robots.” Investors, meanwhile, want “focused undistracted competent CEOs” who care about profit margins. It’s very hard to reconcile the two visions. Dorsey is vulnerable because unlike many other tech chieftains, such as Mark Zuckerberg, whose special voting shares give them almost unbreakable control, he can be deposed by shareholders. If Singer wins this one, the lesson Silicon Valley CEOs draw is likely to be that they need Facebook-style dual class-shares so they can “follow their bliss in a long-term visionary way” without interference from pesky investors.