Jack Dorsey leaves Twitter board amid Musk takeover bid

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is stepping down from the company’s board effective today, a move that was expected and comes amid Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s multibillion-dollar bid to purchase the platform.

“As we shared back in November, Jack would be leaving the Board when ‘his term expires at the 2022 meeting of stockholders,'” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement to The Hill.

NBC News reported that the stakeholder meeting took place Wednesday.

The co-founder’s departure comes a month after Twitter announced an initial deal to sell itself to the world’s wealthiest man for some $44 billion. 

However, Musk put his initial plans to purchase the social media platform on hold earlier this month due to what he said were concerns about spam and fake accounts on the platform.

Musk and Dorsey are reported to be friendly.

Dorsey has been highly critical of Twitter’s board, tweeting in April that it has “consistently been the dysfunction of the company.”

Dorsey stepped down as the company’s CEO in November, with the company announcing that Parag Agrawal, who had been its chief technical officer, would replace Dorsey and take his board seat.

In a statement on that announcement, Dorsey said Agrawal has been a transformative force during his 10 years at Twitter.

“I’ve decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders,” Dorsey said at the time.

Twitter recently launched a new initiative to handle misinformation on the platform, saying it will stop amplifying and promoting content about crises that are flagged to mislead users and will place warnings on tweets that violate the new policy as well.

Dorsey tweeted his support of Musk’s acquisition of the platform, saying in a thread that the biggest mistake he made while Twitter’s CEO was letting it be owned by Wall Street. 

“Elon’s goal of creating a platform that is ‘maximally trusted and broadly inclusive’ is the right one. This is also @paraga’s goal, and why I chose him. Thank you both for getting the company out of an impossible situation,” Dorsey said in his Twitter thread.

“This is the right path…I believe it with all my heart,” he added.