# The Two Companies *A Biography of Jack Dorsey* — Legendary Biographies No. 109 - **Subject:** Jack Patrick Dorsey - **Written by:** Sterling Aldridge - **Shelf:** Technology & Money / Technology - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 206 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-106-2) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Alasdair Finn (ISBN 979-8-90623-190-1) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/109-the-two-companies.html ## About this book Two companies, two firings, and one message of four words: "just setting up my twttr," sent from a San Francisco office at 9:50 p.m. Pacific Time on March 21, 2006. Jack Patrick Dorsey, born in St. Louis, Missouri, on November 19, 1976, co-founded Twitter with Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Noah Glass. He was fired as chief executive in October 2008, returned in 2015, and was fired again in November 2021. In between he founded Square, now Block, with Jim McKelvey in 2009 and carried the public-company chief executive's job twice over. Since 2021 his work has gone into the open-protocol social network Nostr and into Block, the Bitcoin-Lightning payments company. Sterling Aldridge's biography follows the whole arc: the St. Louis childhood as eldest of three sons of a mass-spectrometer machinist and a homemaker, the early obsession with dispatch software, the New York University dropout, the web cab-dispatch work in Oakland, and the Odeo podcasting startup that produced Twitter as a side project. Then the 2007 SXSW launch and the long ascent through the social-media decade, the November 2013 IPO, the years of Elliott Management's activist pressure and its 2020 challenge to his job, the Square founding and the double duty, the 2021 exit from the Twitter chief executive's chair, the Elon Musk acquisition of October 2022 that Dorsey publicly approved, the Twitter Files release that December, the Bluesky board departure of May 2024, and the Nostr and Lightning infrastructure investments that have defined the years since. What emerges is a portrait of a founder whose two-decade career has held the seat at the center of two of the most consequential developments in twenty-first-century communications and payments — and whose investments since Twitter suggest he is working on a third. ## Contents 1. The Map Maker 2. The Podcasting Company 3. The Quiet Coup 4. The Square 5. The Return 6. The President and the Platform 7. January Sixth 8. The Departure 9. The Handoff 10. The Bitcoin Maximalist 11. The Protocol 12. The Square Becomes the Block 13. The Body 14. The Contradictions 15. The Man and the Machine 16. What Twitter Became 17. The Legacy of the Tweet 18. The Dispatch 19. Bitchat ## Questions **Who is The Two Companies about?** Jack Patrick Dorsey. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Two Companies — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 5,564 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 63,000 words, 19 chapters, 206 pages in the paperback. ## The writer Sterling Aldridge is an Atlanta-based business journalist whose work for Bloomberg Businessweek and The Wall Street Journal has focused on the founders, fraudsters, and venture capitalists of the late-stage tech industry. After years of reporting on the ground, he transitioned to writing book-length portraits of industry figureheads. His biographies, including Satoshi, On the Run, and The Monopolist, examine the human cost of rapid technological scale. Other works like The Encino Hills, The Lanai Purchase, and The Five-Day Firing focus on the high-stakes boardroom battles that define modern Silicon Valley. He has also authored The Black Turtleneck and The Glen Park Library. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he spends his free time restoring midcentury modern furniture and cycling through the city's historic neighborhoods.