Jack Dorsey, once fired as Twitter CEO and currently CEO of payments company Square, has officially been named the permanent CEO of Twitter by the board of the company, after serving in the role on an interim basis for the past three months.
Dorsey will continue serving as the CEO for the mobile-payments company Square Inc.
Investors of Twitter have said that they are happy with the odd decision made by the company to make Dorsey their permanent CEO. Twitter increased in market value by about 5% with the news.
Yet critics believe that it will be a significant challenge for Dorsey to run two publicly traded companies at the same time. Twitter’s board of directors initially expressed reluctance in hiring someone who is running another company to serve as its CEO.
However, this widely-held belief by Twitter insiders began to change over time after they began seeing firsthand what a good job Dorsey was doing as the company’s CEO.
Twitter CFO Adam Bain said, “Having Jack back has been really exciting. There’s an amazing thing bring the founder back, bringing a product-driven founder back to the company. I came to the company five years ago partly to work with Jack in his role as chairman. He’s been somebody who’s been thinking about Twitter for so long, so we brought Jack back and for me it was just a continuation of a conversation we’ve been having for five years.”
SunTrust analyst Robert Peck approved of Twitter’s decision.
“We think it’s a positive for the company. Jack is supported not only by employees and the industry but by investors as well. Jack is the best candidate out there of the realistic candidates,” he said.
Now that Dorsey has secured permanent status as the company’s CEO, he will continue the challenge of restoring Twitter’s position on Wall Street and the ever changing world of social media.
Dorsey, who co-founded the company, previously served as Twitter’s CEO until 2008, when he was replaced by Evan Williams, the company’s other founder.
One of the biggest challenges that Dorsey will face is kick-starting the growth of the social network. Twitter has stalled at roughly 300 million users, and it is declining in popularity when compared to other social media services like Snapchat and Instagram.
Dorsey was named interim CEO of Twitter on July 1st after the previous CEO, Dick Costolo, resigned. Since that time, Twitter’s stock has suffered, trading around $26, which was the company’s IPO price.
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