Jack Dorsey's reputation suffered a significant blow last week with the release of an excerpt of a new book from New York Times reporter Nick Bilton on Twitter's early days. This week, a new profile of Dorsey in The New Yorker includes a number of quotes in which the Twitter cofounder defends himself.
Perhaps the most damning charge in New York Times excerpt was that Dorsey threatened to quit working at Twitter unless cofounder Noah Glass was forced out from running the company. In Bilton's telling, Dorsey then met up with Glass after he was let go and acted dumbfounded, blaming cofounder Ev Williams for the decision.
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In The New Yorker profile, however, Dorsey denied the claim that he threatened to quit. "I didn’t give an ultimatum ... I didn’t have that leverage. Ev made his decision," Dorsey said. "Ev asked me, 'Should we let Noah go?' And I said, 'I don’t think I can work with him in his current state.'"
Of course, that still doesn't undermine the claim that Dorsey played dumb when he was approached by Glass after and blamed Williams for pushing Glass out.
Dorsey also fights back against the book's depiction of him as a distracted CEO who left work early to indulge in other pursuits like yoga and fashion courses. According to The New Yorker, "Dorsey says that he always resumed working later in the evening."
Bilton's book also reports that Dorsey lobbied to get the board to push Williams out as CEO after Dorsey had lost the title to Williams and became chairman — a face-saving position with no real power. Dorsey doesn't exactly try to dispel this claim.
“I was chairman. Many people were coming to me. I would say, ‘You should bring that up with the board, not just to me,'" he told The New Yorker. “Was I thinking, Screw Ev? Emotionally, was I asking that? I don’t know. Maybe.”
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