Losses & profits. A distant homage to their hippie ancestors, the geeks of Silicon Valley have always been fascinated by India and its mysteries. Back from Asia, Steve Jobs (1955-2011), the founder of Apple, walked around in a monk’s tunic, barefoot in summer and winter, and ate only vegetable juice. Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, in 2006 was fired from his business two years later for taking too many yoga classes. And his return to the helm in 2015 did not prevent him from gradually transforming himself into a new age guru, shaved head, long beard and nose ring, he who is now content with one meal a day. Once again, shareholders, impervious to the virtues of the sun salutation and other improbable postures, obtained his departure. He resigned and is replaced by his deputy, Parag Agrawal… an Indian engineer, we learned, Monday, November 29!
It is not so much his eccentricity that the Elliott Management and Silver Lake funds criticize Jack Dorsey as his dilettantism. “I have enough flexibility in my schedule to focus on the important things, and I have a good sense of what is critical for both of my companies”, he explained one day to justify his role as CEO of the two companies he created, Twitter and Square, founded in 2009 and become a star of online payment. But even for a follower of the splits (Hanumanasana for yogis), the posture is difficult to maintain over time.
The calculation is quickly done
Admittedly, Elon Musk, however less connected to Asian spirituality, is capable of running both his electric car company, Tesla, and his space company, SpaceX, but, deep down, the shareholders of Twitter felt that the social network no longer interested its founder sufficiently. Especially when he announced, in 2020, that he wanted to go to Africa for six months to study the potential of cryptocurrencies.
He is not necessarily wrong. First, financially. He now only owns 2% of Twitter, compared to 14% of Square. And above all, the latter is worth 98 billion dollars (86.5 billion euros) on the stock market, against less than 37 billion for Twitter. The calculation is quickly done. More fundamentally, the future of Internet payments, credit, and currencies looks bright. On the other hand, that of social networks is uncertain. Jack Dorsey, like his friend Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, has faced political hostility, especially since the censorship of Donald Trump in January. In addition, the audience has peaked at around 330 million tweetos, and the transformation into a profitable business is long overdue. Zuckerberg invents a future for himself in the parallel universes of the metaverse, Dorsey sees it in virtual currency. As a form of reincarnation.