Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey, has said that American billionaire, Elon Musk, is not the right person to run the company, noting that it “all went south” for Musk after he bought the social media giant.
Elon Musk struck a deal to buy Twitter for roughly $44 billion, in a victory by the world’s richest man to take over the influential social network frequented by world leaders, celebrities and cultural trendsetters.
Twitter agreed to sell itself to Musk for $54.20 a share, a 38 percent premium over the company’s share price before he revealed he was the firm’s single largest shareholder. It would be the largest deal to take a company private — something Mr. Musk has said he will do with Twitter — in at least two decades, according to data compiled by Dealogic.
Dorsey, once a supporter of Musk’s $44billion takeover, gave a frank assessment when asked if the company’s new owner and CEO had proven himself the right man for the job.
“No. Nor do I think he acted right after realising his timing was bad. Nor do I think the board should have forced the sale. It all went south,” Dorsey wrote on Bluesky, an invite-only Twitter alternative he is backing, Bloomberg reported.
Dail Mail reports that Dorsey had been on good terms with the Tesla CEO prior to his takeover and last year called Musk’s acquisition of Twitter as ‘the singular solution I trust.’
Musk has since implemented widespread changes to boost revenue at Twitter after the social media platform saw advertising income drop last year in the run up to his takeover. The company rolled out its Twitter-verified blue tick as a paid service, a move Dorsey also slammed on Bluesky.
“Payment as proof of human is a trap and I’m not aligned with that at all. The payment systems being used for that proof exclude millions if not billions of people,” he wrote.
According to the report; Musk has since returned blue ticks to accounts with more than one million followers – confusing celebrities across the world.
The entrepreneur has also shrunk the employee-base by about 80 percent since his acquisition.
The social media firm was now ‘roughly breaking even’, Musk said in a recent Twitter Spaces interview. But after Twitter had made 3,700 of the company’s approximated 7,500 employees redundant in November, Dorsey apologized to current and ex-staff.
In what was his first tweet addressing the takeover, Dorsey said he was sorry for growing the company ‘too quickly’ and declared that Twitter employees ‘always find a way no matter how difficult the moment’.
The co-founder rolled over his 18 million shares into the Elon Musk era of the company rather than taking a payout. His shares equal approximately a 2.4 percent stake in the company.
This means he will be one of Twitter’s biggest investors in the company, and contributed roughly $1billion to Musk’s $44billion purchase.