Jack Dorsey is a 'Block Head'

The person running a company worth $63 billion would like you to address him as "Block Head." That's Jack Dorsey's new title, according to words written on a document uploaded by a person to a server maintained by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Dorsey has long preferred "head" or "lead" to more conventional titles like "senior vice president." Except for Block CFO Amrita Ahuja, all of Block's executives are "leads." As CNBC reminisced, Dorsey wrote in 2012 that "titles, like 'CEO,' get in the way of doing the right thing." Shortly after he tweeted that, Dorsey revealed he had cut back on the time he was spending as executive chairman of Twitter to focus on his payments company, then known as Square.

Dorsey gave up the CEO title at Twitter last year and has said he will soon step down from its board, where he has served as a director since the company's earliest days. That's the same board that he thinks is marred by "dysfunction," which, well, takes one to know one.

Elon Musk, who is trying to buy Twitter, shares Musk's aversion to conventional titles. On words written on a document uploaded by a person to a server maintained by the Securities and Exchange Commission last year, Tesla announced Musk would henceforth be known as "Technoking" and Tesla CFO Zach Kirkhorn would be referred to as "Master of Coin." But Dorsey went further than Musk. Because Musk and Kirkhorn apparently just can't be bothered to amend bylaws, they retained their titles as chief executive officer and chief financial officer. Otherwise, you know, paperwork.

We tend to think of things like "CEOs" and "chairpersons" as things that, you know, companies have, because reasons. But those titles are only important inasmuch as they are required by company bylaws. Apple's bylaws, for example, don't actually require that its board have a chair, and for years when Steve Jobs was CEO, it went without one.