What is Jack Dorsey’s Net Worth, Career, Biography, Facts, Age, Life Story

Jack Dorsey is an American web developer and businessman who has a net worth of $12 billion. Though he may be most widely known as the co-founder and co-creator of Twitter, interestingly the majority of Jack Dorsey’s net worth actually comes from his stake in the mobile payments company Square. As of this writing, Jack Dorsey owns around 2% of Twitter’s outstanding shares. As of this writing, that 2% stake is worth just $800 million. As of this writing he owns around 43 million shares of Square. As of this writing, those shares are worth around $9 billion. He also controls around $1 billion worth of cash and other assets.

Jack has pledged over $1 billion to charity. He funded his pledge in April 2020 using shares of Square.

Early Life

Jack Dorsey was born on November 19, 1976 in St. Louis, Missouri. He became interested in computers and communications at an early age and began programming while still a student at Bishop DuBourg High School, in St. Louis. He was fascinated by the technological challenge of coordinating taxi drivers, delivery vans and other fleets of vehicles that needed to remain in constant, real-time contact with one another. When he was 15, Dorsey wrote dispatch software that is still used by some taxicab companies today.

When Jack was 17 he hacked the website of New York City’s largest taxi dispatch company. A benevolent hacker, he emailed the dispatch company’s CEO and offered to help fix the vulnerability. He was offered a job and subsequently moved to NYC where he enrolled at NYU.

At some point in 1990s as the dotcom craze swept the nation, Jack followed his boss from the dispatch company to San Francisco where they launched a web business that quickly folded. Next, Jack landed a job working for a podcasting company called Odeo, which was founded by Evan Williams – who had previously founded Blogger and would later found Medium.

In 2006, Dorsey, Evan Williams Biz Stone and Noah Glass held what was later described as a “daylong brainstorming session” to think of new product features for Odeo. One of the ideas that came out of that session was a microblogging/messaging idea that Dorsey tested with Blackberry phones while he was at NYU. The group liked the idea and formed a small committee to work on what they called “project twttr”. As you know, that eventually morphed into Twitter.

Instead of incorporating twttr into Odeo, Evan made the somewhat controversial decision to return several million dollars worth of funding to his Odeo investors and launch Twitter as a separate new company. Some of those Odeo investors would later complain that they were cut out of Twitter’s success.

Twitter

When Twitter was originally launched, it was ridiculed by some critics as a tool for the shallow and self-centered to broadcast the minutiae of their lives to the universe. In its early days, the site also suffered from frequent service outages. But as celebrities and CEOs alike began ‘tweeting’, Twitter was no longer the brunt of so many jokes. Suddenly the head of the “microblogging” movement, Twitter became a powerful platform for U.S. Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain as a method for updating their supporters while on the campaign trail. Dorsey went on to become an investor in the social networking company Foursquare and launched a new venture, Square, which allows people to receive credit card payments through a tiny device plugged into their mobile phone or computer. In 2008, he was named by the MIT Technology Review TR35, as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35. In 2012, The Wall Street Journal called Jack the “Innovator of the Year”. Dorsey joined the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company on December 24, 2013.

Square

In 2009 Jack co-founded a second company that he named Square. The idea came to Jack after a friend (who then became his co-founder) complained about not being able to sell glass faucets and fittings because he didn’t accept credit cards. Square is a mobile payment/financial services company. If you’ve ever bought something at a farmer’s market or from a food truck, you probably handed your credit card over to the merchant who swiped it in a little square card reader that was plugged into an iPad or iPhone.

Square went public in November 2015, almost exactly two years after Twitter went public. On its first day of trading, Square had a $3 billion market cap. That was a major disappointment because the company’s last private funding round valued the business at $6 billion.

In February 2021, Square’s market cap topped $100 billion for the first time. At that point, Jack’s net worth was $16 billion, roughly $15 billion coming from Square.

$1 Billion Donation

Up until April 2020, Jack owned roughly 60 million shares of mobile payments company Square. In April 2020, those 60 million shares were worth $3.6 billion. In April 2020 Jack announced he was moving $1 billion worth of those shares into an LLC he launched called Start Small which he said would focus on COVID-19 relief, women’s health, education and Universal Basic Income. At the time, that $1 billion represented 28% of his total wealth, which meant he had previously been worth $3.57 billion the day before he made the announcement. At the same point his Twitter shares were worth “just” $530 million at that time.

That imbalance in wealth has caused Jack to receive criticism from Twitter investors who don’t think he spends enough time actually performing the job of CEO. He is reportedly not a regular presence at Twitter’s main corporate headquarters in San Francisco. That absence was especially true in 2019 when he made it a goal to visit at least 30 of Twitter’s global offices while also spending 10-days at a silent mediation retreat in Myanmar.

On April 7, 2020, Jack made the following announcement (via Twitter, obviously): “I’m moving $1 billion of my Square equity (around 28% of my wealth) to #startsmall LLC to find global COVID-19 relief. After we disarm this pandemic, the focus will shift to girl’s health and education and UBI [Universal Basic Income]. It will operate transparently…”

With the announcement he immediately made a $100,000 donation to America’s Food Fund.

By December 2020 Start Small had already given away $274 million and still held 15.2 million shares of Square. At that time, those 15.2 million shares were worth $3.12 billion, so the value of his donation had actually tripled!

Real Estate

In August 2018 Jack paid $4.22m million for a home in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles. He listed the home for sale in August 2019, finding a buyer two months later who paid $4.6 million.

His primary residence since 2012 is a large home in San Francisco which he bought for $10 million. In 2017 he paid $22 million for the house next door. The sellers bought that house in 1997 for just $2.85 million. When in San Francisco, Dorsey is known to walk roughly 5 miles to work every day.