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by dan-robertson 2193 days ago
Generally shareholders would prefer a ceo whose incentives are aligned with those of the company. On the one hand maybe it’s good that Dorsey could fuck off from twitter if things went bad and not suffer too much from it: it allows him to take risks and ceos not wanting to take reasonable risks as much as shareholders would like (because they have a undiversified interest in their company doing well but more importantly not doing badly whereas shareholders are typically more diversified and so can accept a bigger loss) is a known issue with many public companies. On the other hand, if he can fuck off and do ok if things go bad, maybe he is less motivated to stop them going bad.

A second issue is that people may feel that he will not be able to do the job properly if he is splitting his time between companies, and twitter have to care about the opinions of their shareholders and their users and their advertisers and their employees. Any of those groups may feel this. A main part of the job of the CEO will be deciding what the companies values are and making sure they are reflected by the firm’s actions. For Twitter at the moment this seems like a harder job than for many companies so possibly it would be even harder than usual to be a part-time CEO.

1 comments

He’s uniquely qualified to run the company:

1) he founded it;

2) he doesn’t depend on it for his own livelihood;

3) he has enough time and space; physically, mentally, financially, and computationally to have proper distance from the company; and

4) Twitter is essentially feature-complete.