Jack Dorsey resigns as Twitter CEO, Parag Agrawal becomes new chief

Dorsey will remain a member of the board until his term expires next year

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has resigned as the chief of the social media firm he confounded in 2006.

The company announced on Monday that the board of directors had unanimously appointed the current chief technical officer, Parag Agrawal, as the new CEO and a member of the board, effective immediately.

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

Dorsey co-founded Twitter in 2006 with Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Noah Glass and served as chief executive of the firm until 2008 before being pushed out of the role.

In 2015, he returned to lead the firm after former CEO Dick Costolo stepped down.

He was currently serving as the CEO of both Twitter and Square, his digital payments company.

"I've decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders," Dorsey said in an email to Twitter employees, without providing any additional detail on why he decided to resign as Twitter CEO.

"There's a lot of talk about the importance of a company being 'founder-led'. Ultimately I believe that's severely limiting and a single point of failure," he added.

In his letter, Dorsey described Agrawal as a "curious, probing, rational, creative, demanding, self-aware, and humble" person who has been "behind every critical decision that helped turn this company around".

"He leads with heart and soul, and is someone I learn from daily. My trust in him as our CEO is bone deep," Dorsey wrote.

Agrawal, an IIT-Bombay alumnus, has a PhD in computer science from Stanford University. He has worked with Microsoft, Yahoo and AT&T Labs before joining Twitter as a software engineer in October 2011.

Agarwal was appointed as the CTO of Twitter in 2017, becoming responsible for the firm's technical strategy.

Dorsey had been under pressure from investors for the past year, who felt he was not giving the platform the focus it needed because he was also running Square. He was nearly ousted last year when Twitter investor Elliott Management sought his removal as CEO.

Elliott Mangement founder Paul Singer questioned whether Dorsey should run two public companies at once. He called for Dorsey to resign as the chief of either of the two firms, before Elliott reached a deal with Twitter's management and private equity firm Silver Lake to appoint three new directors to Twitter's board.

A committee was also created as part of the agreement to review Twitter's leadership and governance.

"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," Elliott's managing partner Jesse Cohn and senior portfolio manager Marc Steinberg said, according to CNBC.

Dorsey was also leading the company when it faced intense pressure from activists to take a more proactive role in moderating misinformation, hate speech and other forms of objectionable content from political leaders.

Perhaps his most daring move was to ban former US President Donald Trump from the platform earlier this year, following the Capitol building riots. The decision provoked strong criticism from Trump's supporters.

Dorsey defended the move as the "right decision" - although he said it sets a "dangerous" precedent.

"I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban @realDonaldTrump from Twitter," Dorsey noted, adding that Twitter "faced an extraordinary and untenable circumstance, forcing us to focus all of our actions on public safety."