Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal becomes CEO, replacing Jack Dorsey

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey steps down while Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer, Parag Agrawal, takes over the position of Dorsey. The company shared this news on Monday.

Shares of Twitter closed below 2.75% on this day.

Overview

At the age of 45, Dorsey served as the CEO of Twitter and his digital payments company Square. According to the company, Dorsey will continue as a board member until the expiration date of his term. It will be at the stockholders’ meeting in 2022. The board chairman will become Bret Taylor, COO and Salesforce President, succeeding a former Google executive, Patrick Pichette. 

Dorsey said in a statement that he decided to leave the company because he believes Twitter is ready to move on from its founders. He didn’t give any further detail of his resignation.

Now it’s Agrawal who has to meet the company’s aggressive internal goals to at least double its annual revenue in and have 315 million monetizable daily active users.

Agrawal has been with Twitter for longer than a couple of years. He was responsible for strategy involving AI and machine learning.

Agrawal was also in charge of finding a leader for a research project Bluesky. Twitter launched it to build open and decentralized models for social media platforms. Before the resignation, Dorsey said Bluesky would support social media organizations collaborating on promoting posts to users. Bluesky could also give users more control over the content they see. Social networks could make restrictions against abuse such as hate speech and other violations.

Senior portfolio manager Marc Steinberg and the company’s managing partner Jesse Cohn said that Twitter has an ambitious multi-year plan to increase the company’s influence and value.

Twitter shares bounced 86% since the end of 2015 when Dorsey took over as CEO.