San Francisco: Activist investor Paul Singer, the billionaire founder of the fund Elliott Management which has a ‘sizable’ stake in Twitter, is seeking to replace Jack Dorsey as CEO, reports suggest.
According to a CNBC report citing sources, Elliott is pushing for Dorsey’s removal because his attention is split between running both Twitter and financial services and mobile payment company Square along with Dorsey’s plan to move to Africa for six months this year.
Elliott has nominated four directors to Twitter’s board and seeks to make other changes at the company.
Twitter declined to comment and Elliott Management didn’t immediately respond.
Twitter stocks were up more than 7 per cent in after-hours trading after the news broke.
Dorsey is the only CEO of two companies with market valuation of more than $5 billion.
He has said he would move to Africa for three-six months to “define the future”.
Dorsey last year announced that his $32.7 billion worth company Square would hire three to four developers and a designer to work on the open-source Bitcoin ecosystem.
Exact details of the Square Crypto project have been closely guarded and remain unclear as of now.
On the other hand, Twitter is also considering a feature that would allow users to tip one another in Bitcoins.
It is not yet clear whether the Twitter tipping feature would integrate with Square. Dorsey has made no secret of his love of Bitcoin over the years.
He is an advocate of digital currency bitcoin but he also says it is “not functional as a currency”.
(IANS)