This week Jack Dorsey resigned from his role as CEO of Twitter, marking the end of his second spell running the social media company (the first ended in 2008). Dorsey will hand the reins to Parag Agrawal, who was the company's Chief Technology Officer.
Under Dorsey's most recent reign, Twitter made substantial progress — almost doubling its daily active user base since 2017. But, as always, some investors wanted more, and didn't like that Dorsey was also the CEO of $100bn fintech company Square, or that he wanted to run both companies during a 3-6 month move to Africa.
Leading the charge against Dorsey was Elliott Management, an activist hedge fund, which last year bought a big chunk of Twitter stock (4% of the company), and agitated to have Dorsey removed as CEO. Elliott and others hoped that progress for Twitter would be swifter under new, more focused, management.
In the end, the two sides reached a deal, and Jack stayed on for another 18 months, until this week when he joined the great resignation.
What's next for Twitter?
Agrawal will have a wish-list of things to get done in the next 5 years, but in 280-characters-or-less the task is simple: to continue growing the user base, monetize those users more effectively and make it into as few "big tech is bad" headlines as possible.
That last part is probably the hardest, but the second goal has proved tricky also. Twitter's successfully rejuvenated its growth, but despite a lot of effort and investment it just can't squeeze out the revenue from its users that Facebook is able to. Twitter makes around $2 a month per active daily user (estimated). Facebook makes almost $5.
