Twitter co-founder steps down as CEO: 'It's finally time for me to leave'

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Jack Dorsey sent the first-ever tweet on the service.

Jack Dorsey speaking at a conference.
(Image credit: Prakash Singh via Getty Images)

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, the most public-facing executive at the social media giant, is stepping down as chief executive (thanks, BBC). Twitter's current chief technical officer, Parag Agrawal, will become the new chief executive.

"It's finally time for me to leave," Dorsey wrote in a statement, adding that Twitter is "ready to move on." Agrawal becomes CEO immediately, while Dorsey will finish his current term on the board (which he says will last till "May-ish") and then leave the company entirely.

Dorsey posted an internal email he'd circulated on, of course, Twitter.

Dorsey co-founded Twitter in 2006 alongside Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Noah Glass, and sent the earliest tweets on the service before overseeing its first years of growth. He left in 2008 to found Square, a payment service that has also become a multi-billion company, before returning to Twitter in 2015 after then-CEO Dick Costolo left.

"There's a lot of talk about the importance of a company being 'founder-led'," Dorsey writes in his email to staff. "Ultimately I believe that's severely limiting and a single point of failure. I've worked hard to ensure this company can break away from its founding and founders."

With regards to his decision to leave the company entirely, Dorsey added: "I believe it's really important to give Parag [Agrawal] the space he needs to lead." Agrawal has been with Twitter since 2011, following spells at AT&T, Microsoft and Yahoo. As CTO he led Twitter's AI strategy and various projects to make tweets in users' timelines more relevant. Cheers for that one.

He'll have some tough targets to meet: Per CNBC's business report, "Twitter aims to have 315 million monetizable daily active users by the end of 2023 and to at least double its annual revenue in that year."

Jack Dorsey speaking at a conference.

(Image credit: Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

Dorsey's email to staff includes a postscript, saying he's going to be sharing it on the site. "My one wish is for Twitter to be the most transparent company in the world," Dorsey writes. "Hi mom!"

Rich Stanton
Rich Stanton
Senior Editor

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."