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The wild life of billionaire Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who eats one meal a day, dates models, and loves bitcoin (TWTR)

Jack Dorsey cofounded Twitter in 2006 and the company has made him a billionaire.

Jack Dorsey
  • He is famous for his unusual life of luxury, including a daily fasting routine, regular ice baths, and a penchant for dating models.
  • Dorsey has also been caught up in the techlash, which engulfed companies like Twitter and Facebook last year.
  • Visit BusinessInsider.com for more stories.
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From fighting armies of bots to quashing rumours about posting his beard hair to rapper Azealia Banks, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey leads an unusual life of luxury.

Dorsey has had a turbulent career in Silicon Valley. After cofounding Twitter in 2006, he was booted as the company's CEO two years late r , but returned in 2015 having set up his second company, Square.

Since then, he has led the company through the techlash that has engulfed social media companies, at one point testifying before Congress alongside Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

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Meanwhile, Dorsey has provoked his fair share of controversy and criticism, extolling fasting and ice baths as part of his daily routine. His existence is not entirely spartan, however. Like some other billionaires, he owns a stunning house, dates models, and drives fast cars.

Scroll on to read more about the fabulous life of Jack Dorsey.

Rebecca Borison wrote an earlier version of this story.

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Vine

At age 15, Dorsey wrote dispatch software that is still used by some taxi companies.

Source: Bio.

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@jack

These days Dorsey doesn't favour the spiky hairdo.

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edyson / Flickr

He briefly attended the Missouri University of Science and Technology and transferred to New York University before calling it quits.

Source: Bio.

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joi / Flickr

Nobody else really seemed interested, so he put away the idea for a bit.

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Getty Images/Bill Pugliano

He got his license in about 2002, before exploding onto the tech scene.

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Flickr via Scott Beale/LaughingSquid

Odeo went out of business in 2006, so Dorsey returned to his messaging idea, and Twitter was born.

Twitter/@jack

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Dorsey kept his Twitter handle simple, "@jack."

Khalid Mohammed / AP Images

Dorsey took out his nose ring to look the part of a CEO. He was 30 years old.

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Wikimedia Commons

By 2008, Williams had taken over as CEO, and Dorsey transitioned to chairman of Twitter's board. Dorsey immediately got started on new projects. He invested in Foursquare and launched a payments startup called Square that lets small-business owners accept credit card payments through a smartphone attachment.

Sources: Twitter and Bio.

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Reuters

Dorsey had to remind Obama to keep his replies under 140 characters, Twitter's limit at the time.

Source: Twitter

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AP

In 2014 Forbes pegged Dorsey's net worth at $2.2 billion. As of March of this year he was worth roughly $5.1 billion.

Source: Bio. and Forbes

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David Becker / Getty

The $1.40 salary actually represented a pay rise for Dorsey, who in previous years had refused any payment at all.

He's far from the only Silicon Valley mogul to take a measly salary, Mark Zuckerberg makes $1 a year as CEO of Facebook.

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Dorsey does, however, hold Twitter shares worth $557 million at the time of the filing.

Reuters

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This helped Square employees, giving them more equity and stock options. It was also helpful in acquiring online food-delivery startup Caviar.

Alex Davies / Business Insider

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"Now he's able to say, like, 'The BMW is the only car I drive, because it's the best automotive engineering on the planet,' or whatever," Twitter cofounder Biz Stone told The New Yorker in 2013.

The Real Estalker via Sotheby's

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The house has a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, which Dorsey views as a marvel of design.

Twitter/@jack

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In an interview with journalist Kara Swisher conducted over Twitter, Dorsey said he works every out of his kitchen every Tuesday.

PewDiePie/YouTube

Dorsey said Musk's tweets are, "focused on solving existential problems and sharing his thking openly."

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He added that he enjoys all the "ups and downs" that come with Musk's sometimes unpredictable use of the site. Musk himself replied, tweeting his thanks and "Twitter rocks!" followed by a string of random emojis.

Gene Kim

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Dorsey told Rolling Stone about the meal, which took place in 2011. Dorsey said the goat was served cold, and that he personally stuck to salad.

Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for WIRED25

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Appearing on a podcast run by a health guru who previously said that vaccines caused autism, Dorsey said he eats one meal a day and fasts all weekend. He said the first time he tried fasting it made him feel like he was hallucinating.

"It was a weird state to be in. But as I did it the next two times, it just became so apparent to me how much of our days are centered around meals and how the experience I had was when I was fasting for much longer, how time really slowed down," he said.

The comments drew fierce criticism from many who said Dorsey was normalising eating disorders.

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Cindy Ord / Getty Images, Franck Michel

Dorsey would regularly don leather jackets and slim suits by Prada and Herms, as well as Dior Homme reverse-collar dress shirts, a sort of stylish take on the popped collar.

More recently he favours edgier outfits, including the classic black turtleneck favoured by Silicon Valley luminaries like Steve Jobs.

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Getty

Dorsey seems to care less about looking the part of a traditional CEO these days.

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Getty

In 2016 Banks posted on her now-deleted Twitter account that Dorsey sent her his hair, "in an envelope." Dorsey later told the HuffPo that the beard-posting incident never happened.

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Twitter/@JPN_PMO

On his travels, Dorsey meets heads of state, including Japan's Prime Minister Shinz Abe.

Source: Twitter

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Shutterstock/Martin M303

Dorsey tweeted glowingly about a vacation he took to Myanmar for his birthday in December 2018. "If you're willing to travel a bit, go to Myanmar," he said.

This came at the height of the Rohingya crisis, and Dorsey was attacked for his blithe promotion of the country especially since social media platforms were accused of having been complicit in fuelling hatred towards the Rohingya.

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Reuters

In a bizarre Huffington Post interview, Dorsey was asked whether Donald Trump an avid tweeter could be removed from the platform if he called on his followers to murder a journalist. Dorsey gave a vague answer which drew sharp criticism.

Following the interview's publication, Dorsey said he doesn't care about "looking bad." "I care about being open about how we're thinking and about what we see," he said.

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Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Dorsey and Sandberg were asked about election interference on Twitter and Facebook as well as alleged anti-conservative bias in social media companies.

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AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

Dorsey was in the hot seat for several hours. His heart rate peaked at 109 beats per minute.

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Shutterstock

Dorsey said in the "Tales of the Crypt" podcast that he started using ice baths and saunas in the evenings around 2016.

He will alternately sit in his barrel sauna for 15 minutes and then switch to an ice bath for three. He repeats this routine three times, before finishing it off with a one-minute ice bath.

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He also likes to take an icy dip in the mornings to wake him up.

Source: CNBC

Sports Illustrated Swimsuit / YouTube / Getty

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Page Six reported in September last year that the pair were spotted together at the Harper's Bazaar Icons party during New York Fashion Week. Page Six also reported that Dorsey's exes included actress Lily Cole and ballet dancer Sofiane Sylve.

Source: Page Six

Teresa Kroeger/Getty Images

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In particular, Dorsey is a fan of Bitcoin, which he described in early 2019 as "resilient" and "principled." He told the "Tales of the Crypt" podcast in March that he was maxing out the $10,000 weekly spending limit on Square's Cash App buying up Bitcoin.

See Also:

SEE ALSO: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says he eats only one meal a day and fasts all weekend, and people are concerned he might have an eating disorder

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