To some investors, Dorsey holding the position of CEO in two leading companies of the world was unpalatable. Although Dorsey was facing no serious protests from investors, he chose to relinquish his role as the CEO of Twitter. Many analysts believe his decision is guided by his passion for bitcoin. He wants to transform Square into the next-gen electronic payments system that deals in both crypto and fiat currencies.

Dorsey has been a big fan of bitcoin and in recent months he introduced features on Twitter that offer bitcoin tips. In July, Dorsey had announced that he would launch a new venture that would make bitcoin mining more accessible. Mining is a validation process for transactions on a distributed ledger, one of the basic principles of blockchain technology.

Dorsey’s decision to give up the role of Twitter CEO to focus more on Square and bitcoin mining follows Meta (formerly Facebook) founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's decision to transform his company from social media to metaverse – a virtual universe that combines Artificial Intelligence, Digital Avatar, Virtual Currencies, Smart Contracts, Decentralized Finance, Non-Fungible Tokens, and more.

By delegating the day-to-day affairs of the company to an old Twitter hand, Parag Agarwal, Dorsey virtually announces his transition to the metaverse, or to build it.

Twitter’s market cap at $37.4 billion is way behind that of Meta (formerly Facebook) the market cap of which is close to a trillion dollars ($940 billion).

In this context, Dorsey leaving Twitter makes more business sense. Over the last decade, Twitter has emerged as the only social media platform where the powerful people of the world bare their hearts and speak their minds.

It’s a platform to reach out to people before the media and rumor mills can distort the message. Dorsey courted controversies day in and day out – banning former US Prez Donald Trump from its platform while allowing Taliban groups to continue with their hate propaganda. Dorsey walking out of Twitter will allow the social media giant to focus on business and benefit from its formidable user base.

Before Dorsey co-founded Twitter in 2005, he dabbled in modeling and fashion designing. As a Twitter CEO, he was a quirky personality who walked five miles to his office to beat stress and remain alert on the job. He would eat only dinner and fast on the weekends. Dorsey will also spend hours in meditation. The bearded Dorsey in his casuals hardly ever looked like the old fashion model that he was before 2005.

Twitter is phenomenal for the way it makes all Presidents, PMs, CEOs, billionaires, and celebrities of the world come to the platform and speak what they think or feel about an issue.

But Dorsey seems to have chosen for himself a world that’s still evolving and unfolding. He could well be part of the forces that would shape the contours of this emerging alternative universe marked by its transformative and immersive digital experience.

The baton of leadership at Twitter passes on to an unassuming Parag Agarwal, the current CTO. He has a BTech in computer science from IIT Bombay and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. Agarwal has been working at Twitter since 2011. He joins the ranks of SundarPichai (Google), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Arvind Krishna (IBM), and Shantanu Narayen (Adobe) — all of whom belong to a long list of Indian techies who occupy top positions in leading companies worldwide.

From here, the journey of Twitter is likely to be less controversial and more business-friendly.

A key point in Parag Agarwal’s elevation to the chief executive of the $37 billion social media platform, where his annual package includes $1 million in cash and $12.5 million in equity, is the importance of CTO, a position that he held before.

The role of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) is increasingly becoming very important in the new business environment which is tech-heavy, to say the least. Apart from the celebrated names, many technology entrepreneurs are presiding over multi-billion dollar companies as CTOs, rather than CEO. For example, Dharmesh Shah who co-founded Hubspot, a marketing automation company now worth $40 billion, is still the CTO of the company. As businesses become inalienably linked to technology, the role of engineers, particularly the CTO, has become profoundly important.

Parag Agarwal’s elevation as the Twitter CEO will send a positive message down the startup ecosystem everywhere and underline the importance of all those who bring technological solutions to the table.

The world’s richest man and tech entrepreneur, Elon Musk tweeted: USA benefits greatly from Indian talents! He was responding to a tweet by financial payment system Stripe CEO Pattrick Collison who said: Google, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, and now Twitter run by CEOs who grew up in India. (IPA Service)