After all, didn’t his idol Steve Jobs run Apple and Pixar? The man who invented the service and changed the world by giving instant voice to anyone, for better or worse, was finally back in charge of his creation.Ĭan one person run two big public companies? Dorsey insisted he could. Four years later, Dorsey stepped in for Costolo to once again become Twitter's leader. Not only did that weird app turn into Square-now valued at nearly $100 billion-but in 2011, Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo, who had replaced Williams, tapped Dorsey to be the company’s part-time product guru.

Revenge, they say, is a dish best served cold, but in the next few years, Jack Dorsey was presented with a lavish feast, served not only piping hot but probably vegan as well. The situation still stung when I met him a few months later, when he took me to his apartment to show me his new idea, a little acorn-shaped doodad that could make your phone into a credit card swiper. Dorsey, a person whose emotions run deep, was in distress, as he confessed to me during a late-night discussion. Twitter was taking off, but Dorsey had been bounced from his leadership role, and his cofounders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, were taking public victory laps, appearing on talk shows and at conferences. But back home, all the moving and shaking in the company he had invented-a short-form blog platform called Twitter-was happening without him.

It was 2009, and we were in Baghdad, among a group of Silicon Valley movers and shakers on a State Department junket to visit businesses, universities, and the eerily deserted Iraq National Museum.

Night of revenge twitter