The wild life of billionaire Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who is known for eccentricities like eating one meal a day, and taking ice baths

Dorsey began programming while attending Bishop DuBourg High School in St. Louis.

At age 15, Dorsey wrote dispatch software that is still used by some taxi companies, according to a biography on Dorsey.

Like many of his fellow tech billionaires, Dorsey never graduated college.

He briefly attended the Missouri University of Science and Technology and transferred to New York University before calling it quits in 1999, one semester before graduation, to focus on his idea for Twitter, according to the biography.

In 2000, Dorsey built a simple prototype that let him update his friends on his life via BlackBerry and email messaging.

Nobody else really seemed interested, so he put away the idea for a bit, according to a Stanford Blog.

About two years later, he became a licensed masseur.

He got his license in about 2002 before exploding onto the tech scene, the Wall Street Journal reported.

He got a job at a podcasting company named Odeo, where he met his future Twitter cofounders.

Odeo went out of business in 2006, so Dorsey returned to his messaging idea, and Twitter was born.

On March 21, 2006, Dorsey posted the first tweet.

Dorsey kept his Twitter handle simple, “@jack.” He hasn’t changed it since.

Dorsey and his cofounders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, bought the Twitter domain name for roughly $7,000.

Dorsey took out his nose ring to look the part of a CEO. He was 30 years old.

A year later, Dorsey was already less hands-on at Twitter.

By 2008, Williams had taken over as CEO, and Dorsey transitioned to chairman of Twitter’s board.

Dorsey immediately got started on new projects. He invested in Foursquare and launched a payments startup called Square that let small-business owners accept credit-card payments through a smartphone attachment.

In 2011, Dorsey got the chance to interview President Barack Obama in the first Twitter Town Hall.

Dorsey had to remind Obama to keep his replies under 140 characters, Twitter’s limit at the time.

Twitter went public in November 2013, and Dorsey was a billionaire within hours.

In 2014, Forbes pegged Dorsey’s net worth at $2.2 billion, and it spiked as high as $12.5 billion in 2021.

It was revealed in a 2019 filing that Dorsey earned just $1.40 for his job as Twitter CEO the previous year.

The $1.40 salary actually represented a pay rise for Dorsey, who in previous years had refused any payment at all.

He’s far from the only Silicon Valley mogul to have taken a measly salary — Mark Zuckerberg makes $1 a year as CEO of Facebook.

He bought a BMW 3 Series with his newfound wealth but reportedly didn’t drive it often.

“Now he’s able to say, like, ‘The BMW is the only car I drive, because it’s the best automotive engineering on the planet,’ or whatever,” the Twitter cofounder Biz Stone told The New Yorker in 2013.

He also reportedly paid $9.9 million for this seaside house on El Camino Del Mar in the exclusive Seacliff neighborhood of San Francisco.

The house has a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, which Dorsey views as a marvel of design.

Jack Dorsey told Kara Swisher in 2018 that Elon Musk was his favorite Twitter user.

Dorsey said Musk’s tweets were “focused on solving existential problems and sharing his thinking openly.”

He added that he enjoyed all the “ups and downs” that came with Musk’s sometimes unpredictable use of the site. Musk himself replied, tweeting his thanks and “Twitter rocks!” followed by a string of random emojis.

Both Musk and Dorsey are crypto enthusiasts and appear to have a friendship of sorts.

Dorsey has also engaged with other tech entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, who once served him a goat he had killed himself.

Dorsey told Rolling Stone about the meal, which took place in 2011. Dorsey said the goat was served cold and that he personally stuck to a salad.

Dorsey’s eating habits have raised eyebrows over the years.

In 2019, Dorsey appeared on a podcast run by a health guru who previously said that vaccines caused autism. Dorsey said during his interview that he ate one meal a day and fasted all weekend. He said the first time he tried fasting it made him feel like he was hallucinating.

“It was a weird state to be in. But as I did it the next two times, it just became so apparent to me how much of our days are centered around meals and how — the experience I had was when I was fasting for much longer, how time really slowed down,” he said.

The comments drew fierce criticism from many who said Dorsey was normalizing eating disorders.

In a later interview with Wired, Dorsey said he ate seven meals a week, “just dinner.”

In the early days of Twitter, Dorsey aspired to be a fashion designer.

Dorsey would regularly don leather jackets and slim suits by Prada and Hermès, as well as Dior Homme reverse-collar dress shirts, a sort of stylish take on the popped collar.

More recently he has favored edgier outfits, including the classic black turtleneck favored by Silicon Valley luminaries like Steve Jobs.

He also re-introduced the nose ring and grew a beard in more recent years.

Dorsey seems to care less about looking the part of a traditional executive these days.

The singer Azealia Banks said she was sent clippings of Dorsey’s beard hair to fashion into a protective amulet, although Dorsey denied this happened.

In 2016, Banks posted on her now-deleted Twitter account that Dorsey sent her his hair, “in an envelope.” Dorsey later told the Huffington Post that the incident never happened.

Dorsey has said he doesn’t care about “looking bad.”

In a bizarre Huffington Post interview in 2019, Dorsey was asked whether Donald Trump — an avid tweeter — could be removed from the platform if he called on his followers to murder a journalist. Dorsey gave a vague answer that drew sharp criticism.

Following the interview’s publication, Dorsey said he didn’t care about “looking bad.”

“I care about being open about how we’re thinking and about what we see,” he added.

In September 2018, Jack Dorsey was grilled by lawmakers alongside the Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Dorsey and Sandberg were asked about election interference on Twitter and Facebook as well as alleged anti-conservative bias in social media companies at the event.

During the hearing, Dorsey shared a snapshot of his spiking heart rate on Twitter. He was in the hot seat for several hours, and he showed his heart rate peaked at 109 beats per minute.

Dorsey testified before Congress once again on October 28, 2020.

Dorsey appeared via videoconference at the Senate hearing on Section 230, a part of US law that protects internet companies from legal liability for user-generated content, as well as giving them broad authority to decide how to moderate their own platforms.

In prepared testimony ahead of the hearing, Dorsey said stripping back Section 230 would “collapse how we communicate on the Internet” and suggested ways for tech companies to make their moderation processes more transparent.

And during the hearing, Dorsey once again faced accusations of anti-conservative bias.

The accusations from Republican lawmakers focused on the way Twitter enforces its policies, particularly the way it has labeled tweets from President Trump compared to other world leaders.

Dorsey took the brunt of questions from lawmakers, even though he appeared alongside Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

He appeared in another hearing a few weeks later with Zuckerberg, facing questions from Republicans who were displeased with how the platforms had dealt with President Donald Trump’s social media accounts. 

When he’s not in Washington, Dorsey regularly hops in and out of ice baths and saunas.

Dorsey said in the “Tales of the Crypt” podcast he started using ice baths and saunas in the evenings around 2016.

He alternately sits in his barrel sauna for 15 minutes and then switches to an ice bath for three. He repeats this routine three times before finishing it off with a one-minute ice bath.

He also likes to take an icy dip in the mornings to wake him up.

Dorsey’s dating life has sparked intrigue. In 2018, he was reported to be dating the Sports Illustrated model Raven Lyn Corneil.

Page Six reported in September 2018 that the pair were spotted together at the Harper’s Bazaar Icons party during New York Fashion Week. Page Six also reported that Dorsey’s exes included the model and actor Lily Cole and the ballet dancer Sofiane Sylve.

At the end of 2019, Dorsey said he would move to Africa for at least three months in 2020 and he almost lost his role as CEO.

Dorsey’s announcement followed a tour of Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa. “Africa will define the future (especially the bitcoin one!). Not sure where yet, but I’ll be living here for 3-6 months mid 2020,” he wrote on Twitter.

But, then Dorsey came under threat of being ousted as Twitter CEO by the activist investor Elliott Management.

Both Bloomberg and CNBC reported in late February 2020 that the major Twitter investor  — led by Paul Singer — was seeking to replace Dorsey. 

Reasons given included that Dorsey split his time between two firms by acting as CEO of both Twitter and his financial-tech firm Square, as well as his planned move to Africa.

But Dorsey managed to strike a truce with Elliott Management.

Twitter announced on March 9, 2020, that it had reached a deal with Elliott Management that would leave Jack Dorsey in place as CEO.

The deal included a $1 billion investment from the private-equity firm Silver Lake, and partners from both Elliott Management and Silver Lake joined Twitter’s board.

Patrick Pichette, the lead independent director of Twitter’s board, said he was “confident” they were “on the right path with Jack’s leadership” but added that a new temporary committee would be formed to instruct the board’s evaluation of Twitter’s leadership.

In July 2020, hackers compromised 130 Twitter accounts in a bitcoin scam.

The accounts of high-profile verified accounts belonging to Bill Gates, Kim Kardashian West, and others were hacked, with hackers tweeting out posts asking users to send payment in bitcoin to fraudulent cryptocurrency addresses.

As a solution, Twitter temporarily blocked all verified accounts — those with blue check marks on their profiles — but the damage was done.

And Musk said during a July 2020 interview with The New York Times that he personally contacted Dorsey following the hack.

“Within a few minutes of the post coming up, I immediately got texts from a bunch of people I know, then I immediately called Jack so probably within less than five minutes my account was locked,” said Musk.

Twitter announced in 2021 that Dorsey had stepped down as CEO.

CNBC was the first to report on Dorsey’s expected resignation, citing unnamed sources.

Twitter confirmed the story the same day, announcing the Chief Technology Officer, Parag Agrawal, would take over as CEO with immediate effect.

Dorsey posted on his Twitter account saying: “Not sure anyone has heard but, I resigned from Twitter.”

In his tweet, he included a screenshot of the email he sent to Twitter staff announcing his resignation.

—jack⚡️ (@jack) November 29, 2021

In May 2022, his time on the board of directors officially came to an end, an anticipated move that coincided with the company’s stockholder’s meeting.

Two days after Dorsey stepped down as Twitter CEO, Square changed its name to Block.

“The name change creates room for further growth,” the company said in a statement.

“Block references the neighborhood blocks where we find our sellers, a blockchain, block parties full of music, obstacles to overcome, a section of code, building blocks, and of course, tungsten cubes,” it added.

The line about tungsten cubes was an apparent reference to a craze among crypto enthusiasts of paying as much as $3,500 for novelty tungsten cubes.

In April 2022, Dorsey changed his official title at Block from CEO to “Block Head.”

The title change was made official in a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 20, 2022.

“There will be no changes in Mr. Dorsey’s roles and responsibilities,” the filing said.

Block’s website was also updated to list his new title as Block head.

Musk tweeted in response to the news using fire emojis to signal his approval for Dorsey’s title.

—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 23, 2022

Musk officially added the title of “Technoking” to his role at Tesla in March 2021.

The Block head is also a big believer in cryptocurrency, frequently posting about its virtues.

In particular, Dorsey is a fan of Bitcoin, which he described in early 2019 as “resilient” and “principled.” He told the “Tales of the Crypt” podcast in March that year that he was maxing out the $10,000 weekly spending limit on Square’s Cash App buying up Bitcoin.

In October 2020 he slammed Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong for forbidding employee activism at the company, saying cryptocurrency is itself a form of activism.

He’s also said he hopes bitcoin can help bring about “world peace” in a panel alongside Musk and Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood called “The B Word” on July 2021. He said he loves the bitcoin community because it’s “weird as hell.”

“It’s the only reason that I have a career — because I learned so much from people like who are building bitcoin today,” Dorsey said.

In an April 2022 tweet, Dorsey said his “biggest regret” was Twitter shutting down Vine.

Dorsey replied to a Twitter user lamenting Vine’s demise saying: “I know. Biggest regret,” accompanied by a sad face emoji.

Twitter acquired the short-form video app Vine in 2012 but shut it down in 2016.

In August 2022, Twitter’s former head of security, Peiter Zatko, filed a whistleblower complaint with the SEC, alleging the company participated in negligent security practices under Dorsey.

In his 84-page report and subsequent testimony, Zatko made a number of allegations against the company, including claims it had “egregious deficiencies” around security protocol and that Dorsey experienced a “drastic loss of focus” in his last year as CEO of Twitter. 

In September 2022, Dorsey was deposed and questioned under oath as part of Elon Musk’s legal battle with Twitter and his proposed $44 billion takeover.

Musk’s team accused Twitter of misleading investors and intentionally “miscounting” spam accounts, Insider reported. 

Later that month, private texts revealed Dorsey had tried to get Musk involved with Twitter a year prior to the Tesla CEO’s $44 billion proposal.

In the texts, Dorsey explained why he left the company and said he previously pushed to get Musk involved with Twitter. 

“A new platform is needed. It can’t be a company. That’s why I left,” Dorsey wrote to Musk, adding he thought Twitter should be an “open-sourced protocol” and couldn’t “have an advertising model.” 

Dorsey also told Musk he had advocated for the Tesla CEO’s addition to the Twitter board a year earlier, but the request was denied, which he said he thought “was completely stupid and backwards.”

More recently, Dorsey has apologized for some of the things that have taken place at Twitter since Musk took over.

After Musk ordered mass layoffs at Twitter after taking over in November 2022, Dorsey tweeted an apology: “I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation: I grew the company size too quickly. I apologize for that.”

“Folks at Twitter past and present are strong and resilient,” he wrote on Twitter. “They will always find a way no matter how difficult the moment. I realize many are angry with me.”

He continued: “I am grateful for, and love, everyone who has ever worked on Twitter. I don’t expect that to be mutual in this moment…or ever…and I understand.”

And despite initially supporting Musk’s takeover, Dorsey hasn’t always agreed with all of the Tesla CEO’s decisions.

Last year, Dorsey criticized Musk’s decision to rebrand the social media site’s Birdwatch feature to call it Community Notes, dubbing it the “most boring Facebook name ever.”

In April, the Twitter cofounder openly criticized Musk’s leadership in a series of social media posts Friday, writing that “it all went south” and Musk “should have walked away” from the acquisition. 

But in July, Dorsey said “running Twitter is hard” after Musk sparked a backlash by announcing “rate limits” on viewing tweets.

“I don’t wish that stress upon anyone,” Dorsey tweeted. “I trust that the team is doing their best under the constraints they have, which are immense. It’s easy to critique the decisions from afar … which I’m guilty of … but I know the goal is to see Twitter thrive. It will.”

Dorsey also urged “calm” when Musk rebranded Twitter to X in July.