Jack Dorsey's biggest problem with Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter)

So on Tuesday, in a court case with Elon and X, from his X employees, the investor shareholder cap table of X got released in that court proceeding. And in there, they listed the different investors that took X private. It includes a who's who, like a P. Diddy connected VC fund, A16Z, the Saudis, a Palantir connected VC fund, and you. And so my question for you is, how do you feel about the direction that Elon has taken the platform that you built? I think that was actually sincere applause for you. I made a decision to roll over my shares. So I had 3% of the company, Elon bought it. I kept all my shares, I didn't sell any. I didn't have this giant payday as a company was sold. I did so because first and foremost, I believe in the idea of Twitter, much more than any particular manifestation. The manifestation of the idea that I believed in the least, the absolute least, was a public company. We were a public company that was reliant upon one business model solely, in a singular fashion, and that was the advertising model. And the reason why we had an advertising model is because our peers did. We wanted to go public, and that was the fastest path to do so. And there was no ability to send value across the internet. There was no micropayments on the internet, as Jack talked about. We've actually been talking about it for 40 years, if not more. And Zaps is the biggest living, scaling, experimentation of that idea. Thank you, Will, and thank you for the entire Bitcoin ecosystem for making that possible. So, taking it private, I'm so grateful that someone was able to do that. I'm so grateful that it was taken private by an entrepreneur and a technologist instead of a private equity firm. It would be dead at this point. It would be dead if it was still a public company, because there's no hope of competing with the likes of Facebook and Google. And it allows the space to do some experimentation and do a lot of different things. And Elon is testing that. I don't always agree with the methods or the sequence. The reaction to perceived threats, which I don't see as threats at all. But I appreciate that it's covered and protected and they can experiment. The biggest disagreement I have with the way it's run and the potential for it in the future is before I left, we wanted to build a protocol. Right now, Twitter owns the protocol. It owns the presentation layer and it owns the distribution. All three. It puts a ton of pressure for whoever's running that company to make decisions around what's on the service and what's not. Having a protocol where the content lives and you can separate those other layers takes away a bunch of the liability and still allows you to build a really amazing business on top of it. And it'd be my hope that Elon and the company recognize this and they recognize the single point of failure that they're in. It doesn't matter who is the CEO of that company. No matter how much you love them or hate them, they're in a place where they have a choke point. And that choke point can be their business model. It can be the relationship with their other businesses. It can be countries threatening to raid the offices of their employees or put them in jail, which we had when I was CEO of Twitter many, many times in countries all around the world. And it's not sustainable. You can't build a company that means to serve as a town square, a public town square without having something underneath it that no single entity owns. And that's what Nostra represents to me is that you can remove some of that liability and you can get back to the idea of what Twitter was meant to be and what it ultimately is by providing a much stronger foundation that no single person, no government, no company owns or can remove. And that's what this is all about to me is giving options to a company like Twitter so that they can take that option. I'm not saying that they will, but the fact that it's an option is really important. I don't know, I'm conflicted. I really love Twitter. I loved building it. I still love it. I think the algorithm has taken over too much. Everything I don't love about it, I see alternatives in Nostra that I do love. And it's not me saying we should do this, we should do this, we should do this. People just come to their own conclusions. I'm like, man, that's awesome. That's awesome that someone's thinking about that and they're doing it and no one's telling them to do it. They just want it and they wanna build it. And they don't have to ask for any permission. As a CEO of another company, people have to ask permission from me all the time to get money and to fund their projects and to get budget and whatnot and to be able to take myself out of that equation and instead take the benefit I've had from building something like Twitter and Square and Block and giving it to organizations like Matt to make those decisions in a rigorous way with a board of nine people, which I'm told is extremely important, that particular size, and other organizations, and for them to make those funding decisions about ideas that we should have in these experiences and these protocols and these platforms is pretty amazing to see. And so while I'm upset about various things in Twitter, I love that the idea, idea, idea, idea, persist and that it's even being made stronger and stronger and stronger every day in the work that we're talking about over these past two days. They're pre-clapping for your question because they know the next one's gonna be a banger. I mean, I used to love Twitter too, but I think Nostra fixes this. Yeah, I do, I agree.