Willie R. Tubbs, FISM News
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Jack Dorsey, the at times mercurial billionaire who co-founded Twitter and is phasing himself out of the company, took a page from the Elon Musk playbook Saturday renaming his position at Block, Inc.
Block, Inc., formerly known as Square, is no longer run by a chief executive officer. Rather, the company now has a “Block Head” in the form of Dorsey, who either never watched the children’s show “Gumby” or did watch and has a particular feeling of connection with the show’s antagonists, the Blockheads.
More likely, Dorsey drew inspiration from Musk, who recently bestowed upon himself the title of “Technoking” at Tesla. Musk also deemed his chief financial officer the “Master of Coin.”
As with Musk, Dorsey’s title change is purely ceremonial, and as likely as not, a sophomoric attempt at humor. In reality, the Block Head has only given himself a title that replaces that of CEO and president.
“There will be no changes in Mr. Dorsey’s roles and responsibilities, and he will continue to serve as principal executive officer of the Company,” reads the SEC filing that made the title change official.
Perhaps the change was long in coming. As early as 2012, Dorsey expressed his support of companies that break from tradition in terms of the naming of executive positions.
“Titles like ‘CEO’ get in the way of doing the right thing. Respect to the people who ignore titles and fight like hell for what is right,” Dorsey tweeted a decade ago.
Titles, like "CEO", get in the way of doing the right thing. Respect to the people who ignore titles, and fight like hell for what is right.
— jack (@jack) September 29, 2012
The term “CEO” also hasn’t applied to Dorsey at Twitter since last year, when he stepped down to make way for current Twitter leader Parag Agrawal.
However, Dorsey still enjoys control at Block, which he co-founded in 2009. Block is the parent company for payment processing platforms Square, Cash App, and Afterpay, as well as web hosting service Weebly.