Jack Dorsey

“Jack Dorsey likes to keep things simple,” says Dan Milmo in The Guardian. He eats only one meal – dinner – and sometimes fasts at weekends. He tries to meditate for two hours a day. It’s pretty austere behaviour for a man worth an estimated $11.8bn.

As of this week the 45-year-old will have even more time for meditation: he has stepped down as chief executive of Twitter, but will remain CEO of the other multibillion-dollar company he founded, Square, which processes payments online and at the shop counter. A self-taught computer programmer, Dorsey has never fitted the chief executive stereotype: he currently has a nose ring and a wizard-like beard. He used to dream of being a dressmaker. As his Twitter co-founder Nick Bilton once told him: “You can either be a dressmaker or the CEO of Twitter. But you can’t be both.”

While Dorsey is best known for Twitter, the “vast majority” of his wealth comes from his 11% stake in Square, says Eliza Haverstock in Forbes. The fintech firm’s stock price has “more than tripled since January 2020”, adding almost $10bn to his net worth. The “sliver” of Twitter he owns is worth a relatively meagre $850m. In April 2020 Dorsey pledged to give away nearly a third of his Square shares, an effort he is tracking on a public Google Doc. He has gifted almost half the $1bn they were worth then – but, thanks to Square’s soaring share price, he still has $3.2bn to give away.