Twitter Owner Wants Full-Time CEO

Twitter is a pretty silly company but it’s not Snap. Twitter Inc. makes a tiny fraction of the money that dominant social-media giant Facebook Inc. makes, but it has been profitable for the last two full years; Snap Inc. has never been profitable. Twitter went public in 2013 at $26 per share, and closed on Friday at $33.20; Snap went public three years ago and is still below its IPO price. Facebook is eating Twitter’s lunch, but it is eating Snap’s breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, midnight snack, dog-face filters and self. Twitter is often blamed for enabling online abuse and destroying democracy but at least that means it matters.

Twitter’s chief executive officer, Jack Dorsey, is also the CEO of another public company and plans to move to Africa for a while, apparently mostly to work for the other company. This is extremely silly indeed, and no professional CEO of a responsible public company would be allowed to do it. “We’d like you to be our CEO,” the board would say, and the CEO would say “sounds great but I am also the CEO of another company, is that a problem,” and the board would say “yes of course that’s a problem, we meant you’d quit your other CEO job and work for us, that’s how CEOing works, you can be CEO of multiple companies sequentially but not at the same time, what on earth,” and the CEO would say “also I think it’d be cool to move to Africa” and the board would go find another candidate. “This candidate was really talented,” they might say, “but he couldn’t commit to working for us and that is kind of important.”