Twitter And Square CEO Jack Dorsey Donates A Quarter Of His Wealth For Coronavirus Relief

08/04/2020

Almost all businessmen and entrepreneurs live their lives to create things that can change or improve how the world works to a variety of degrees.

Most will die trying, with the rest will either succeed, or fail.

Jack Dorsey is the founder and CEO of both Twitter and Square, and he has been one of the many entrepreneurs of tech that dedicate their lives on the products they create, and succeeded along the way.

As a billionaire, he also wants to put his money where it can benefits the society.

Here, Dorsey said that he is donating $1 billion of his own fortune to support relief efforts for the the novel 'COVID-19' coronavirus.

And after the pandemic is over, Dorsey said he is going to use the money to also support girls’ health and education and universal basic income.

Dorsey announced his initiative In a series of tweets:

To come up with that huge sum of cash, Dorsey said that he is pulling 19,833,400 shares from his stake in Square.

With each share of Square worth $50.31, the grand total is $997,818,354.00, or about 28% of Dorsey's wealth.

He said that he chose to use his equity from the payments group because "I own a lot more Square" than Twitter.

Dorsey said that he will cash in the shares over time.

Dorsey also tweeted a link to a public Google Doc where people can track which organizations the fund’s money will go to.

The first is Dorsey in pledging $100,000 to an initiative called America's Food Fund, which was launched by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, and actor-environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio.

As the boss of two influential companies, Dorsey has experienced his fair share of controversy and criticism, and that include extolling fasting and ice baths as part of his daily routine, buying large houses, dating models, driving sports cars, as well as the more recent case when a billionaire hedge fund manager wanted to oust Dorsey from Twitter by buying a lot of its share.

Jack Dorsey
Jack Dorsey

With his donation, Dorsey said that he wants to see the impact of his donation during his lifetime, and that “the needs are increasingly urgent.” He also said he hopes it will inspire others to “do something similar.”

Having control of two separate companies allow Dorsey to have some flexibility to dedicate his shares to causes.

“Why UBI and girl’s health and education? I believe they represent the best long-term solutions to the existential problems facing the world,” Dorsey said in a followup tweet. “UBI is a great idea needing experimentation. Girl’s health and education is critical to balance.”

“The impact this money will have should benefit both companies over the long-term because it’s helping the people we want to serve,” Dorsey said on Twitter.

Dorsey isn’t the only technologist to fund coronavirus relief efforts, though he’s doing it on a bigger scale, relative to his net worth.

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said that he is donating $100 million of his money to U.S. food banks. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have also donated $25 million toward creating treatments for coronavirus through their philanthropic organization, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

As for Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft is known to have become a philanthropist. He even left the company that made him a 'centibillionaire' twice to better spend his time helping people.

Here, Gates has pledged $125 million for coronavirus cure research, with aims to spend billions of dollars more to help research and fight the coronavirus.