Jack Dorsey is doing an about-face on Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover.
Recently, Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder, expressed displeasure with Musk’s leadership of the social-media company, The Washington Post reported over the weekend. Among other comments, Dorsey said Musk shouldn’t have gone through with the deal to buy Twitter.
“It all went south,” Dorsey said.
Dorsey’s comments were all, fittingly, reply posts on the newish social network Bluesky, which he also helped create. He started working on Bluesky while still at Twitter, but it’s now its own company with its own CEO, the Post noted. In response to the changes Musk has made at Twitter—including laying off about 80 per cent of the company’s employees and completely overhauling the user experience—many social-media users are making the switch to Bluesky.
Dorsey’s recent statements are a big shift from how he previously thought about Musk. “Elon is the singular solution I trust,” he said a year ago. “I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.” Now he’s singing a much different tune, saying, “I think he should have walked away and paid the US$1 billion,” in reference to the US$1 billion penalty Musk would have faced had he decided not to buy the site.
Ever since Musk took over Twitter last October—and even before then—his reign has faced controversy after controversy. After he agreed to buy the company in April 2022, Twitter’s valuation fell thanks to economic pressures, as did stock in Tesla, the EV company of which Musk is also the founder and CEO. Musk then tried to walk back the deal, but Twitter sued to force him to follow through. Once he actually took over, the company faced his aggressive management style while users dealt with a host of changes he made to the site itself.
“It’s pretty sad how it all went down,” one Bluesky user wrote last week. “Yes,” Dorsey replied.
As for Musk, he’s yet to respond to Dorsey’s recent comments. (He didn’t respond to The Washington Post’s request.) And while he’s said that he’ll step down as CEO of Twitter, he still currently holds that role. If it were up to Dorsey, at least, it doesn’t seem like Musk would have any involvement with the social-media company at all.
This story was first published on Robb Report USA