Should Jack Dorsey Be Running Twitter And Square At The Same Time?

Every week, Benzinga conducts a survey to collect sentiment on what traders are most excited about, interested in or thinking about as they manage and build their personal portfolios.

This week we posed the following question about Twitter Inc TWTR and Square Inc SQ boss Jack Dorsey:

In your opinion, should Dorsey be running Twitter and Square at the same time?

• Yes
• No, just Twitter
• No, just Square

Twitter is an open distribution platform for and a conversational platform around short-form text (a maximum of 280 characters), image and video content. 

Dorsey founded the platform in March 2006 and launched in July of the same year.

Dorsey founded Square in 2009, a platform that provides payment services to merchants. The company also launched Cash App, a person-to-person payment network.

As of publication time, Forbes lists Dorsey’s wealth at $12.9 billion and ranks him 90th in the world.

Dorsey is far from the only tech leader to embark on the journey of running multiple firms at once. 

Steve Jobs at Apple Inc AAPL and Pixar managed such feats throughout his widely publicized roles in corporate leadership. More recently, there's been Elon Musk at Tesla Inc TSLA and SpaceX.

In general, respondents to our study were highly complimentary of Dorsey’s leadership at the helm of both Twitter and Square, a majority believing Dorsey should continue to run both.

The full results of our study are listed below.

Yes: 52%

No, just Twitter: 28%

No, just Square: 20%

Several respondents said Dorsey is a great business leader with the right foresight to manage Twitter and Square simultaneously. Most recently, it was a fourth-quarter earnings beat from Twitter that also impressed a number of traders and investors.

See Also: How To Buy Twitter Stock

The company reported quarterly sales of $1.29 billion, which beat the analyst consensus estimate of $1.19 billion by 8.4%. This is a 28.1% increase over sales of $1.01 billion in the same period last year.

Twitter also reported fourth-quarter average monetizable daily active users at 192 million versus the 152 million in the same quarter last year.

Many respondents acknowledged it's been a long road for Dorsey at Twitter. For readers who are unaware, Dorsey was fired from Twitter, the company he created, only to return in 2015 to lead the company.

See Also: 5 Fun Facts You Might Not Know About Jack Dorsey

Meanwhile, a number of respondents touched on the larger question of whether social media platforms should have the right to decide what their users can and cannot say. Some respondents took exception to a perceived lack of free speech on Twitter, and see Dorsey as having mishandled the ban of former President Donald Trump from the platform. 

So, how would one go about running multiple companies? Here are five ways CEOs and their businesses can flourish while balancing the art of running more than one company, courtesy of Washington State University's Carson School of Business:

• Giving teams a long leash: Micromanaging multiple businesses is a recipe for disaster.
• Building an ace horizontal team: In addition to building vertical teams by department, executives need a horizontal team of peers on both boards of directors.
• Cross-pollinating and pooling resources: An effective network of vertical and horizontal leadership makes cross-pollination, or sharing information and knowledge between companies, possible.
• Going the distance for face time: Absentee CEOs rarely inspire their family of businesses. Even with highly developed video conferencing technology, in-person face time has no substitute.
• Prioritizing downtime: Running multiple companies can be a high-stress endeavor.

This survey was conducted by Benzinga in March 2021 and included the responses of a diverse population of adults 18 or older.

Opting into the survey was completely voluntary, with no incentives offered to potential respondents. The study reflects results from over 1,000 adults.

Photo credit: JD Lasica, Flickr.