Jack Dorsey, a former co-founder of Twitter, is offering the Instagram account @jack for sale, and quitting the platform.
Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter and current CEO of Block, stated on Friday that he had deactivated his Instagram account, which had the coveted first-name handle.
After years of inactivity, Dorsey revealed he erased the account in a message on the decentralised social network Nostr.
“Don’t know why it took me so long,” he wrote.
“I think I was in the first 10 accounts on the platform, and one of the first angel investors. [Instagram co-founder] Kevin [Systrom] was our intern at Odeo,” he added.
In 2005, Noah Glass and Evan Williams launched Odeo, which then reorganised as the company and eventually gave rise to Twitter.
Dorsey also mentioned that he stopped using the app after Instagram was purchased by Meta, a sale that was detailed in Sarah Frier’s book, “No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram.”
Since they both worked at Odeo, Dorsey and Systrom have been friends. At one point, Twitter even attempted to acquire Instagram but was turned down. According to the book, after feeling betrayed by Systrom for not telling him directly, Dorsey stopped posting to the app when he later learned that Instagram was being sold to Facebook, at the time Twitter’s greatest rival, for $1 billion.
The book mentioned that he hadn’t published anything since April 9, 2012, the day he learned that Instagram was being sold. The image showed a San Francisco bus that was deserted.
The timing of the account sale is indeed intriguing given that Instagram is now directly competing with Twitter in the microblogging app market with its own app, Threads. I
n response to a screenshot of Google Bard’s inaccurate AI-generated output that incorrectly identified Dorsey as a winner from the Twitter sale, Dorsey told another Nostr user earlier this month that he still had a part in Twitter, now known as X.
Other social networks that rival Twitter have received support from the former CEO of Twitter.
Dorsey, who was the project’s original incubator while acting as Twitter’s CEO, assisted Twitter rival Bluesky in getting off the ground.
Dorsey contributed over $245,000 in bitcoin to Nostr, another decentralised networking system.
