Jack Dorsey reveals his cluelessness

From the start, I’ve said Jack Dorsey is the real villain in Elon Musk’s systematic destruction of Twitter. Longtime readers will recall:

To be more blunt, Twitter the company was run extremely poorly by Dorsey, Argawal and so many above and below them for the past decade. The whole fact that we’re even in the situation where the company was susceptible to your taking it private proves it. The stock consistently trailed NASDAQ and the S&P. They only turned an annual profit twice since going public for fuck’s sake.

Even hindsight doesn’t help us understand what those leaders wanted the company to be. Twitter is an ad-supported business with last place ad technology. Where was its leadership during the era when other companies spun user data into gold? Where was its Board of Directors to hold them accountable for missing that boat? Why did it take until the year 2021 for Twitter to commit to building a direct response ad product? These failures are inexcusable and led us directly to where we sit today: They’re out, you’re in.

Now we know. Dorsey gave an interview to Pirate Wires, a site for disaffected techs who lean right but recognize MTG is bat S crazy. In it he shows his vision for Twitter was utterly clueless. To understand this interview you have to understand the context that brought Dorsey and Pirate Wires together. Dorsey just left the board of a decentralized social media platform called Bluesky. Bluesky, originally funded by Dorsey’s Twitter, was supposed to be a “protocol layer” that social platforms like Twitter could build their network on top of. I don’t know. Read the interview if you want a deep dive on that. What Bluesky actually became is a refuge for the disillusioned leftists who fled Musk’s X. In other words, a dumpster fire lighted by a different set of arsonists. Let’s move on.

Old Twitter was a frustratingly slow company that never seemed to really build anything. Just look at how long were people replying to their own tweets before the company released the thread function. So I got a huge kick out of Dorsey revealing this about hiring someone to build Bluesky:

So it took us about two years to interview people [who would build the protocol].

I’m sorry…it took them two years to interview people? Twitter would eventually give the Bluesky team $14 million to build itself. If taking two years to hire a single person you would give a $14 million budget to doesn’t symbolize a poor leader, I don’t know what does.

This wasn’t just some side project either. Dorsey thought Bluesky was the way out of what he thought Twitter’s problems were:

I wanted to do something similar [to Square’s work on bitcoin] with Twitter, because it was the only way to get out of a lot of the issues we were seeing around the decisions we had to make on accounts, and the pressures we had as a public company based entirely on a brand advertising model. The only way to do it was to remove the protocol layer from Twitter and make it something we didn't control.

If Bluesky was the solution to Twitter’s problems, you kinda have to move faster at hiring employee number one, no? LMAO.

That quote is also where Dorsey begins to reveal his cluelessness about Old Twitter’s problems and how to solve them. Take another look at this part:

I wanted to do something similar with Twitter, because it was the only way to get out of a lot of the issues we were seeing around the decisions we had to make on accounts, and the pressures we had as a public company based entirely on a brand advertising model. The only way to do it was to remove the protocol layer from Twitter and make it something we didn't control. [Emphasis added]

If he thought offloading censorship decisions to someone else would solve Old Twitter’s dependence on brand revenue then Old Twitter’s board—which he savaged later in the interview—should have asked for his resignation. He’s correct to say the company was too dependent on brand advertising, but wrong in prescribing the cure. The cure was to diversify its ad revenue by building an ROI-positive direct response advertising engine. Not to outsource moderation decisions.

The core of Dorsey’s inability to that is that I don’t think he really wanted to run an ad-supported company at all. That led to the kind of cluelessness I described above, and here:

The fortunate thing is [X] is no longer a public company with a profit incentive based on an advertising model that can be wildly swayed by the whims of advertisers moving their budget elsewhere if they don't like what you're doing.

Jack, my dude. Take a seat and listen. Advertisers didn’t leave Old Twitter because they didn’t like what you were doing. Advertisers never came to Old Twitter because you didn’t prioritize building an ad platform that worked for them. But I don’t even expect you to understand that because look how you frame this issue:

I think the core, critical sin was choosing the advertising model to begin with. Brand advertising is not like direct advertisement, which is more programmatic. It requires something like a Disney to essentially give you a favor, because the only players that matter to them are Google and Facebook. Snapchat, Twitter, everything else did not matter. And these are ads that are essentially throwaway for them.

Dorsey makes it sound like advertisers got together and decided witch ad platforms were for “brand” and which were for “performance” marketing. He can’t be that stupid. Let me be crystal fucking clear: Twitter was and is a brand advertising platform because Twitter itself never built a direct response product that worked. Google built it. Facebook built it. Amazon built it. Twitter didn’t. That was the choice he made to not prioritize it with the money and talent necessary to compete with those other companies. Dorsey is either too stupid to realize this or too prideful to admit the failure happened on his watch.

More:

And I came back to the company a year after IPO, and we were seeing a decline in growth, and that manifested in a decline in ad revenue. So our first focus was to rework the product so we were growing again, and then second was to get off this dependency on advertisement.

And when you're entirely dependent on that, if a brand like P&G or Unilever doesn't like what's happening on the platform, and they threaten to pull the budget, which accounts for like 20% of your revenue? You have no choice, and... you have no choice. If you take a stance, and they pull the budget, and the stock market sees that, the stock price goes from like 70 bucks to 30.

Deliberatus has absolutely no fucking idea what alternate reality Dorsey is talking about. Old Twitter never got off the dependency on advertising. And when did “a brand like P&G or Unilever” pull off the platform? Their budgets may have gone down, but the mass exodus Dorsey implies didn’t happen until after Musk ruined the company.

I keep trying to find words other than “clueless” to describe Dorsey, but it’s the only one that fits. He was the damn CEO of Twitter when Meta faced boycott after boycott. Did Meta see a hit to its stock price because Unilever pulled back budget? No. Why not? Because Meta collected enough data, hired brilliant engineers and devoted resources to building an advertising algorithm that drives sales for millions of tiny advertisers. They keep funneling ad budget into the platform because the platform keeps finding new people to buy their products, and in turn Meta is insulated from advertiser boycotts. Think about that in comparison to Dorsey’s hairbrained idea for Twitter.

Notice, too, how Dorsey artfully tries to blame his company’s fate on the stock market. It was those damn retail investors who prevented him from prioritizing a direct response ad algorithm. Bastards.

After those comments, Pirate Wires directed the discussion toward the activists investors who tried to save Twitter from Dorsey’s failed direction. But this change in direction couldn’t get him out of his alternate reality:

So my only path out that I could see was: we have to be on a protocol that we can't remove content from. We have to move away from this dependency on brand advertisement. We were moving into commerce, direct response, and payments.

“We were moving into[…]direct response…” I defy Jack Dorsey to find one single advertiser who believed his Twitterw as making meaningful strides toward a direct response ad product. If it was, where was the revenue growth? And where were those advertisers to hold the company up after Musk began driving away big brands? They were nowhere, because they don’t exist.

Dorsey gets even more detached from reality later:

Oh, we'd create other revenue lines. We'd focus more on commerce. We'd focus more on payments. We'd focus on everything they're trying to do right now. All this we were doing before the company was sold. But I would do it faster, because as a private company, you can just shut down the advertising business, and only work on commerce. Only work on payments. Only work on small advertisements, more akin to classifieds, which I think is a phenomenal business for something like Twitter, where you have more direct response, but at a very, very localized level. [Emphasis added]

Deliberatus has absolutely no idea what the fuck. Classified ads? He is aware the internet destroyed the concept of classified ads? Maybe that’s the issue—Dorsey just completely spaced out on the past 30 years. Like they got Men-In-Black zapped from his memory. Classified ads. The fuck. Also what is this “you can just shut down the advertising business and only work on commerce.” You can? How you gonna cash flow that, Jack?

The rest of the interview goes into AI, LLM and other tech du jour. Pirate Wires treats Dorsey like a tech god, and Deliberatus supposes that’s not without merit. The guy has created some pretty impactful companies.

But when it comes to Twitter, or X if you want to call it that (what kind of idiot brands his company as his favorite letter? Another post, I guess), Dorsey let the idea, the product and the company down with his ignorance and incompetence. As this interview shows.