Jack Dorsey has stepped down as CEO of Twitter and has been replaced with Parag Agrawal, Twitter's current chief technology officer, according to an announcement from the company Monday morning.
Dorsey wrote in his departure note that Agrawal was his top choice for the CEO job and that he was selected by unanimous decision from Twitter's board. Bret Taylor, the president and chief operating officer of Salesforce, has been selected as the Independent Chair of the Board of Directors. Dorsey will remain on the board until his term expires in 2022.
"There's a lot of talk about the importance of a company being founder-led. Ultimately I believe that's severely limiting and a single point of failure," Dorsey wrote.
Agrawal has worked at Twitter for the last decade and served as CTO for the last four years. "We recently updated our strategy to hit ambitious goals, and I believe that strategy to be bold and right. But our critical challenge is how we work to execute against it and deliver results," Agrawal wrote in his all-staff note.
Dorsey, who is also the founder and CEO of payments device company Square, has come under repeated fire from investors for allegedly failing to focus his energies fully on running Twitter. In addition to his leadership of Square, the Twitter CEO has become a bitcoin evangelist and launched a new startup called TBD earlier this year that aims to build a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange.
Dorsey previously came closest to losing his job after he announced a controversial plan in late 2019 to spend half of his time living in Africa in 2020, a move that prompted activist investors at Elliott Management to try to force a leadership change. Dorsey survived the challenge from the Elliott investors and did not make the move, though he cited the coronavirus pandemic as the main reason for delaying the plan.
Correction: This story was updated to correct Parag Agrawal's current role at Twitter.
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