Jack Dorsey: Co-founder of Twitter and Block
Business Owner · Financial Services
Jack Dorsey co-founded Twitter and the payments company Block (Square, Cash App), and later the decentralized social network Bluesky. He is a St. Louis native and NYU dropout.
About Jack Dorsey: Co-founder of Twitter and Block
Jack Patrick Dorsey (born November 19, 1976) is an American tech entrepreneur and businessman who co-founded Twitter, Inc.; the financial-technology company Block, Inc., which owns and operates Square, Cash App, Afterpay, Bitkey and Tidal; and the microblogging network Bluesky. As of February 2026 Forbes estimated his net worth at $5.9 billion. Dorsey was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Timothy G. Dorsey, who worked for a company that developed mass spectrometers, and Marcia A. Dorsey, a homemaker. He attended Bishop DuBourg High School, worked occasionally as a fashion model in his younger days, and by 14 had become interested in dispatch routing. He enrolled at the University of Missouri-Rolla in 1995, transferred to New York University in 1997 and dropped out two years later, one semester short of graduating. He came up with the idea that eventually became Twitter while at NYU. Working as a dispatch programmer, Dorsey moved to California, and in 2000 started a company in Oakland to dispatch couriers, taxis and emergency services from the Web. In July 2000, building on dispatching and inspired in part by LiveJournal and AOL Instant Messenger, he had the idea for a Web-based, real-time status and short-message service. Wondering whether the status output of instant messaging could be shared easily among friends, he later approached the company Odeo, and the idea grew into Twitter. Sources: English Wikipedia (Jack Dorsey, accessed September 2026).
Basic Information
Co-founder, Twitter, Block (Square, Cash App) and Bluesky
Company Details
Block, Inc.
Fintech, Payments, Social Media