“It all went south.”
Bad Timing
Former Twitter CEO and cofounder Jack Dorsey isn’t impressed with how current CEO Elon Musk is running the social media platform — a significant about-face that signals the deterioration of a once-strong relationship.
In comments made on his new decentralized Twitter clone, Bluesky, Dorsey said that Musk “should have walked away” from buying Twitter last year.
He also noted that he no longer believes Musk is the right leader for Twitter, “nor do I think he acted right after realizing his timing was bad,” Dorsey wrote. “Nor do I think the board should have forced the sale.”
“It all went south,” he added.
All Downhill
It’s a notable change in tune for the former Twitter CEO, who celebrated Musk as “the singular solution I trust” in an April 2022 tweet, around the time Musk announced his intent to buy the company.
The acquisition itself was a rocky affair, with an increasingly desperate Musk looking for ways to back out of the deal.
And ever since it went through, Musk has made drastic changes to Twitter, firing the majority of the company’s staff and scaring off advertisers with his antics and erratic decision-making.
According to Dorsey, Musk “should have walked away and paid the $1 billion,” referring to the “breakup fee” to back out of the deal. But as CNBC reports, it’s still not clear if the billionaire CEO even had that option available to him.
Clearly, while championing the deal as the right way forward for Twitter at the time, Dorsey has had plenty of time to think about the sale, especially now that the company’s operations are in chaos following Musk’s takeover.
In his comments on Bluesky, Dorsey, who stepped down as CEO back in 2021, attempted to distance himself from the deal gone sour.
“Was I optimistic? Yes,” Dorsey wrote. “Did I have the final say? No.”
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