Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square, has been named Twitter’s permanent CEO.
Dorsey himself made the announcement on Twitter Monday Morning.
Dorsey stepped in as interim CEO of Twitter in place of Dick Costolo in July. He will also continue to serve as Square’s CEO.
“Delighted for @jack and the team and excited for the future of Twitter,” Costolo tweeted following the announcement. “@jack is a calm and thoughtful leader. He is bold, forthright, decisive, and the team loves working with him.”
In a series of tweets, Dorsey noted that Twitter’s team will continue to help make the social network a powerful communications tool.
“Twitter stands for freedom of expression. We stand for speaking truth to power. And we stand for empowering dialogue,” he tweeted.
“We’re working hard at Twitter to focus our roadmap on a few things we can make really great. And we’re strengthening our team along the way. Our work forward is to make Twitter easy to understand by anyone in the world, and give more utility to the people who love to use it daily!”
The company also named Adam Bain as its COO.
Twitter dumped Dorsey his first time around, but its board of directors is now convinced he has the maturity and expertise to fix the problems that have caused the company’s stock to lose nearly half its value in the past five months.
“As a founder and inventor of the product, Jack knows more about Twitter than anyone else,” said Peter Currie, the Twitter director who led the search for a new CEO.
Investors applauded the move as Twitter’s stock surged $1.53, or almost 6 per cent, to $27.84 in early afternoon trading. Dorsey’s biggest challenge at Twitter will be finding a way to make the site easier to navigate and broaden its appeal beyond media junkies, athletes, celebrities and politicians.
The short messaging service has amassed more than 300 million users but its growth has been slowing to the frustration of investors, even as people spend more time online, particularly on their smartphones. Facebook has hooked 1.5 billion people on its online social network and even its photo-sharing application, Instagram, has surpassed Twitter in size. Unlike Twitter, Facebook has been making money for years and its stock has more than doubled from its IPO price. In contrast, Twitter’s stock is barely above its IPO price of $26 nearly two years after its market debut.
Dorsey should be highly motivated to lift the stock price, given he owns a 3 per cent stake in Twitter currently worth about $600 million.
– With files from The Associated Press
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