jack dorsey: Jack Dorsey could make a comeback at Twitter in a more powerful role: Former Twitter India head Manish Maheshwari

Chennai: Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter could make a comeback at Twitter in a more powerful role, possibly even as the Chairman of the company, Manish Maheshwari, the former head of Twitter India and now founder and CEO of ed-tech firm Invact Metaversity, told ET in an exclusive interview on Tuesday. He said that Dorsey and Musk were “close ideologically” and that Musk was often invited to give talks to employees at company townhalls when Dorsey was the CEO.

Maheshwari said Dorsey being ousted could have set the ball in motion for what we’re seeing today. The microblogging platform, in the wee hours on Tuesday said it has entered into a definitive agreement
to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion. Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company.

Maheshwari said that Dorsey and Musk were quite close and that it was common for Musk to address Twitter’s employees at many of the company-level meetings that took place when he was working at Twitter.

“And now even in their public tweets, they have been appreciating each other. Jack has been supportive of this bid from Elon. This is a change of guard in favour of Jack in a way because taking it private allows them to do things they could not have done otherwise,” he explained.

On Tuesday, in fact, Dorsey tweeted that, in principle, he didn’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. “It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness,” he said.

Maheshwari went a step ahead and said the two were quite close ideologically and that he would not be surprised if Jack comes back with a much more powerful role at Twitter. “It may not be the CEO, it could be a very strong chairman of the board. And then there could be an operational leader to support Jack and Elon,” he said.

He went on to add that people see Dorsey as a visionary founder and as someone who carries the soul of the company. He also highlighted that the former Twitter CEO enjoys a strong fan following, both among Twitter employees but also the Bay Area in general.

Musk has been a vociferous advocate of making Twitter’s algorithm open source. Some of Twitter’s technology is already open source, which means it’s publicly available for anyone to view, rework, and use for other purposes.

“Any changes to people’s tweets — if they’re emphasized or de-emphasized — that action should be made apparent,” Musk had said. “So anyone can see that that action has been taken so there’s no sort of behind-the-scenes manipulation, either algorithmically or manually.” He added that the underlying code behind the algorithm should be available on GitHub, so that users could inspect it themselves.

Maheshwari said that Dorsey has always batted for algorithmic transparency, which means that when a user opens their Twitter feed they should be able to choose which algorithm they want to select and how their timeline should be as opposed to Twitter taking that decision. Blue Sky was one such project that he said Dorsey was closely working on, which “from an intent perspective” addressed Musk’s vision but possibly was not moving at the desired pace to effect change. Maheshwari said the reasons for this could be tied to Twitter being a public entity. But all this can change with Musk steering things.

“Since Twitter is a public company and it is accountable to shareholders, it (opening up the algorithm) could jeopardise its business interest,” he explained. “If there is a certain way that you’re showing the feeds and you change it, it could have an impact on what people see, how much they spend on Twitter, and how much you can monetize it through ads. And therefore, the progress on Blue Sky was not very fast, even though it was announced a couple of years ago.”

From an India perspective, Maheshwari said that with Musk taking over, the focus on India could increase because he said that for aggressive growth, India is a large market from a user perspective and one that can’t be ignored.

“My view would be that they’d want to see more growth from India, from a user perspective,” he said. “That would mean more resources and a larger team in India. That’s my hypothesis. Therefore, I don’t see any kind of layoff or trim down in India because they would rather focus on India as a growth engine.”

However, he said that Musk’s claim that he will make the platform one that has “no ads” could have serious implications on how teams are organised. Maheshwari said there are large ad and sales teams and a large part of the revenue comes from ad sales. “The question is – what happens to that (the ad and sales teams)? And these are profound changes. So, we’ll have to wait and watch how this unfolds and what it really means,” he said.