Jack Dorsey Born: Twitter's Co-Creator Arrives

Jack Dorsey co-founded Twitter at age 29, creating the 140-character microblogging platform that reshaped global communication, journalism, and political discourse within a decade. His second venture, Square, democratized credit card processing for small businesses and evolved into Block, one of the largest fintech companies in the world. Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1976, Dorsey showed an early fascination with dispatch routing software, writing programs as a teenager that tracked the real-time movement of taxis, ambulances, and delivery trucks. This interest in short-form status updates led directly to Twitter's concept: what if everyone could broadcast their current status to anyone who wanted to listen? The first tweet, sent by Dorsey on March 21, 2006, read "just setting up my twttr." The platform grew slowly at first, breaking through at the 2007 South by Southwest conference, where it was used to coordinate the festival in real time. By 2009, Twitter had become a geopolitical force, used by Iranian protesters during the Green Revolution and by ordinary citizens to report news faster than traditional media. Dorsey was pushed out as CEO in 2008, replaced by Evan Williams, but returned to the role in 2015. His leadership style was unconventional: he split his time between Twitter and Square, practiced extended fasting, and took ice baths every morning. He left Twitter permanently in 2021, a year before Elon Musk acquired the company for $44 billion and renamed it X. Square, renamed Block in 2021, processes over $200 billion in annual payment volume, serving the small vendors and street merchants that traditional banks had ignored.