Jack Dorsey
Source of wealth: Twitter, Square
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Modules
Biography
Jack Dorsey is chairman and block head (effectively CEO) of payments company Block, formerly known as Square.
Dorsey cofounded Square with Jim McKelvey in 2009, then took it public in 2015; it was renamed Block in 2021.
He was previously CEO of Twitter from 2015 to 2021 and stepped down from the board in 2022.
Dorsey cofounded Twitter in 2006 with Ev Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass, and was CEO until 2008. He returned in 2015.
In 2020, he promised to give away $1 billion (then 28% of his net worth) to Covid-19 relief and other causes. He has donated $760 million so far.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Jack Dorsey
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Jack Dorsey, linked to Technology and 'Twitter, Square', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 53 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 3.4 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.