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American web developer and businessman Jack Dorsey has amazingly amassed a net worth of $12 billion. Jack Dorsey is well-known as the co-founder of the micro-blogging and social media company, Twitter. The company has more than 200 million users daily and the reported revenue in 2021 is estimated to be around $5.1 billion. Though he is widely known to the world as the co-founder and co-creator of Twitter, ironically, the vast majority of Dorsey’s wealth came from the other company he co-founded called Block Inc. Just when you thought this is enough to make him delighted, he co-founded yet another company in 2009 which is widely successful these days called Block Inc. and had a revenue of $17.7 billion in 2021. Though most of net worth is in shares in both Twitter and Block Inc., he controls about $1 billion of cash and other assets.
Early Life And Numerous Business Ideas
Jack Patrick Dorsey was born on November 19, 1976 in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the son of Tim and Marcia Dorsey. He has some Irish blood from his father’s side and some Italian blood from his mother’s side. His father used to work for a company to develop mass spectrometers while his mother is a stay at home wife. Their family was devout Catholics and he has an uncle who is a Catholic priest in Cincinnati. During his teenage years, he attended the Bishop DuBourg High School and during that time, he occasionally worked as a fashion model. When he reached the age of 14, he had developed an interest in dispatch routing. He has created some open-source software which is still being used by some taxicab companies to this day.
In 1995, Dorsey decided to enroll at the University of Missouri–Rolla. Then he transferred to New York University in 1997. However after about two years, he decided to drop out even though he is just one semester away from graduating. It was during his days at the NYU when he developed the idea of Twitter. While he was working on dispatching as a programmer, he decided to move to California and in 2000, he has started his own company in Oakland that will dispatch taxis, couriers and some emergency services from the Web. He has other projects and ideas during this time that included networks of medical devices and some frictionless service market which did not seem to succeed.
Creation of Twitter
It was in March 2006 when Jack Dorsey decided to create Twitter along with Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. They started in March and launched it in July of the same year. Jack Dorsey was Chief Executive Officer of the company and as Twitter began to increase its popularity, Dorsey decided to make some improvements on the uptime as his top priority. Two years passed and Twitter was still not design to earn as Dorsey stated that the commercial use of Twitter and its API are two things that could potentially lead to the paid features. In October 16, 2008, Evan Williams has taken over as the CEO of the company while Dorsey decided to become the chairman of the board.
Dorsey joined numerous State Department delegations during his time as the chairman which included a trip to Iraq in April 2009 which was led by Cohen. He assumed the post of interim CEO upon the departure of the previous CEO was named permanent CEO of Twitter on October 5, 2015. It was only around November 2021 when he announced that he will relinquish his Chief Executive title on the company, fifteen years after he cofounded the company. Upon his departure on the company, he will be leaving with an estimated $11.8 billion which is nearly ten times of what he is worth over a decade ago. However it was not Twitter that brought him this multi billion fortune, it was his fintech company called Square which brought him about 88% of his estimated fortune. His Twitter is only worth $850 million at the time of his departure from the company.
Creating His Multi Billion Wealth through The Fintech Company Block, Inc.
A huge portion of Jack Dorsey’s wealth came from his 11% stake at the fintech company which enables the credit card payments for the small businesses called Block, Inc. It helps small business owners accept and process credit card payments and track inventories and sales through mobile point of sale. The stock price of Block, Inc. has tripled since January 2020. Jack Dorsey cofounded the company and has been the company’s CEO since 2009. Block Inc. has a lot of businesses, Square which is the payments platform, CashApp which is a mobile app that allows transfers monetarily among its users and businesses, Afterpay which is a buy now then pay later service, Weebly which is a web hosting service and TIDAL which is a music and video streaming service. It was in 2015 when the company went public and for six years, Dorsey ran both Twitter and Block Inc. at the same time. The hard work he put in Block Inc. has paid off Dorsey financially when he became a billionaire in the fall of 2012. He grew his fortune through the years however his fortune went from $6.3 billion in October 2018 to $2.6 billion in April 2020 because of the pandemic however he added another $9 billion to his net worth before 2021 ended.
Sources: Forbes, Celebrity Net Worth, The National News