Jack Dorsey has an impossible task: to make Twitter better
I am not sure what a low-key billionaire is supposed to look like, but I'm certain that's the look Jack Dorsey was aiming for when he opened Twitter's developer conference last month. He was wearing one of the first Twitter T-shirts (slightly creased, with the slogan: "Wearing my Twitter shirt"), jeans, trainers and an unidentifiable smartwatch, having ditched the beard shortly before the CEO job looked permanent. That's a shame, because however post-beard San Francisco likes to think it is, it's still a pleasingly jarring thing to have some facial fur among all the achingly dull preppy blue shirts and dark jeans of the Valley.
As Dorsey came on stage, I was only slightly distracted by remembering that his net worth is $2.3bn. That's so much money as to be almost abstract. Would he notice if he lost any of that? I mean, if he carelessly lost most of it down the back of the Tesla, wouldn't $100m still be more than enough to buy a nice home, travel a bit, give some away and still never work again? Anyway, I have no privileged knowledge of Dorsey planning to leave anything on any of the buses he used to say he took to work in San Francisco. In the meantime, he's probably focused on pulling Twitter out of its fog of despondency. It was for this reason that Twitter decided to name its developer conference Flight, in the hope it might give it wings.
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