Parag Agrawal to replace Jack Dorsey as Twitter CEO

Dorsey will remain a member of the board until his term expires at the 2022 meeting of stockholders, the company said

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is stepping down as chief of the social media company, effective immediately. Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s chief technology officer (CTO), will take over the helm, the company said Monday.

Shares of Twitter closed down 2.74% on the day.

Dorsey was serving as both the CEO of Twitter and Square, his digital payments company. Dorsey will remain a member of the board until his term expires at the 2022 meeting of stockholders, the company said. Salesforce President and COO Bret Taylor will become the chairman of the board, succeeding Patrick Pichette, a former Google executive, who will remain on the board as chair of the audit committee.

I’ve decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders, Dorsey said in a statement, though he didn’t provide any additional detail on why he decided to resign.

Agrawal, who’s served as CTO since 2017, has been with Twitter for more than a decade. He had been in charge of strategy involving artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning and he led projects to make tweets in users’ timelines more relevant to them.

Agrawal was also previously tasked with finding a leader for Project Bluesky, a research project Twitter launched to establish open and decentralized standards for social media platforms. Dorsey had previously said Bluesky will help social media companies collaborate on how posts are promoted to users and will give users more control over the content they see. Bluesky could also make it easier for the social networks to enforce restrictions against hate speech and other abuse, essentially helping them share the load at a lower cost.

Before joining Twitter, Agrawal held research internships at AT&T, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Dorsey said in an email he published on Twitter that Agrawal has been his choice to lead the company ‘for some time given how deeply he understands the company and its needs.’

Twitter is now executing against an ambitious multi-year plan to dramatically increase the company’s reach and value, and we look forward to the next chapter of Twitter’s story, the company’s managing partner Jesse Cohn and senior portfolio manager Marc Steinberg said. Having gotten to know both incoming Chairman Bret Taylor and incoming CEO Parag Agrawal, we are confident that they are the right leaders for Twitter at this pivotal moment for the company.