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Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal to Take Over as CEO Jack Dorsey Steps Down

jack dorsey

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey stepped down as CEO Monday. CTO Parag Agrawal was named CEO.

“There’s a lot of talk about the importance of a company being ‘founder-led,’” he wrote in a staff email he then shared on the microblogging platform he helped create. “Ultimately I believe that’s severely limiting and a single point of failure.”

Twitter, he said, is “ready” to move away from its founders.

Shares of Twitter jumped as much as 10% in pre-market trading following an initial report by CNBC.

Twitter stakeholder Elliott Management had looked to replace Dorsey in 2020, but reached a deal with company management. He is CEO of not only Twitter, but Square, a company that manages digital transactions.

Dorsey, whose Twitter bio says just “#bitcoin,” has expressed an interest in cryptocurrency. He has also been in the news frequently in recent months because of Twitter decision to ban former president Donald Trump from the platform following the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot, as well as various other tech-related issues. He has repeatedly testified on Capitol Hill.

In March, he sold the first tweet ever as an NFT, or non-fungible token, for 1,630.58 ether. With the cryptocurrency trading for $1,746 per ether at the time, that came out to more than $2.8 million spent on Dorsey’s tweet.

More to come…