How @jack got crypto pilled

Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square, has a new obsession

- Kurt Wagner

As he walked onstage at the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami, Jack Dorsey was still technically the chief exec-utive officer of two publicly traded companies, but he looked more like a beachside bartender. He wore a sunburst tie-dye shirt, with his head shaved and his long, graying beard untrimmed. He’d flown to South Florida, even though the official policy at one of his companies, Twitter, was that employees weren’t supposed to travel for work, and even though a group of activist investors had spent the better part of the previous 18 months trying to oust him for being unfocused.

No matter: Dorsey had resolved to enjoy himself in the most Jack Dorsey way possible. He went to the beach with a twentysomething model, Flora Carter, had dinner with Dave Portnoy, the professionally obnoxious sports media entrepreneur and stock trading enthusiast, and hung out with Floyd Mayweather, the professionally obnoxious boxer-turned crypto-promoter. (Mayweather was in town on behalf of EthereumMax, a new cryptocurrency, and for an exhibition fight against bro influencer Logan Paul.) Onstage, Dorsey was heckled by Laura Loomer, the far-right conspiracy theorist who’d famously handcuffed herself to the doors of Twitter’s New York office after her account on the social media service was banned in 2018. Dorsey had called her to protest “brave,” and now, when Loomer jeered that Dorsey was the “king of censorship,” he replied earnestly. He said he hoped to remove the “corporate-ness” from Twitter, making it more open and decentralized, like Bitcoin.