INTELLIGENCE · PERSON DOSSIER
UPDATED 2026-08-13Jack Dorsey
Founders & CEOs
Block, Inc. · United States
Net worth
$7.2bn
Block shareholding
48,844,566 shares — 1,000,000 Class A and 47,844,566 Class B
Share of Block's votes
42.2% of total voting power
Share of Block's equity
About 8.2%
Value of his Block stake
About $3.9bn
Identity & Ownership
Current role
Block Head and Chairperson of the Board, Block, Inc.
"Block Head" is Block's own title for the chief executive role. The 2026 proxy statement describes it as "our version of Chief Executive Officer" and Dorsey signs the notice of meeting as "Block Head and Chairperson of the Board of Directors". He has been the company's principal executive officer since July 2009; the title changed from Chief Executive Officer and President to Block Head in April 2022.
Company
Block, Inc. (NYSE: XYZ), formerly Square, Inc.
Square renamed itself Block on 1 December 2021. The NYSE ticker stayed SQ at the time and only changed to XYZ on 21 January 2025. Block's brands are Square, Cash App, Afterpay, TIDAL, Bitkey and Proto.
Nationality
United States
His Schedule 13D filing on Twitter, Inc. records him as "a citizen of the United States of America".
Based
San Francisco, California
Forbes lists San Francisco as his residence. His principal business address in SEC filings is 1455 Market Street, Suite 600, San Francisco.
Board seat at Block
Director since 2009; Chairperson since October 2010; Class I, term expiring 2028
Because he is an employee, Block's board does not treat him as independent under NYSE listing standards; the company appointed Sequoia partner Roelof Botha as Lead Independent Director in June 2022 to sit alongside him.
Born
19 November 1976, St. Louis, Missouri
Son of Timothy Dorsey, who worked for a company making mass spectrometers, and Marcia Dorsey. Block's own 2026 proxy and Forbes both put his age at 49, consistent with this date.
Education
Bishop DuBourg High School, St. Louis; University of Missouri–Rolla; New York University — left without a degree
Enrolled at Missouri–Rolla, now Missouri S&T, in 1995 to read computer science and mathematics, transferred to NYU in 1997 and left two years later, reportedly one semester short of graduating. He returned to Bishop DuBourg to give the 2010 commencement address.
Personal Wealth & Holdings
Net worth
$7.2bn
Forbes real-time estimate, ranking him 557th in the world, with the source of wealth given as "Twitter, Square, Self Made". Live billionaire trackers move daily and other publishers carry different figures.
Block shareholding
48,844,566 shares — 1,000,000 Class A and 47,844,566 Class B
Beneficial ownership as at 31 March 2026. The Class B holding sits across the Jack Dorsey Revocable Trust (35,763,992 shares) and Start Small, LLC (12,080,574 shares), of which he is sole member.
Share of Block's votes
42.2% of total voting power
He holds 79.8% of Block's Class B common stock, which carries ten votes a share against one for Class A. Co-founder Jim McKelvey holds a further 19.9% of Class B and 10.5% of the vote; all directors and executive officers together control 53.3%.
Share of Block's equity
About 8.2%
Derived: his 48,844,566 shares against the 535,370,474 Class A and 59,991,242 Class B shares outstanding at 31 March 2026 given in the proxy. The gap between 8.2% of the equity and 42.2% of the vote is the dual-class structure at work.
Value of his Block stake
About $3.9bn
Derived: 48,844,566 shares at Block's $79.07 close on 11 August 2026. Moves with the share price, and accounts for roughly half the Forbes net worth estimate.
Annual salary
$2.75
His entire compensation. Block's summary compensation table records total pay of $2.75 in each of 2023, 2024 and 2025, with no stock awards, no option awards and no other compensation. The proxy states it is at his own request; the figure is a nod to Square's original 2.75% card-processing rate. The same $2.75 appears in the 2021 proxy for 2018, 2019 and 2020, so he has taken it for at least eight years, and he takes no health insurance from the company either.
Pay ratio
Median Block employee earned $222,772 in 2025; he earned $2.75
Block's mandatory pay-ratio disclosure. The ratio runs the opposite way to almost every other listed company, where the chief executive is the multiple.
Stake in X (formerly Twitter)
18,042,428 Twitter shares rolled into Elon Musk's X Holdings rather than cashed out
His Schedule 13D records 18,042,428 shares, 2.4% of Twitter, contributed to X Holdings I under a Rollover and Contribution Agreement immediately before the merger closed on 27 October 2022, "in lieu of receiving cash merger consideration". At the $54.20 deal price those shares were worth about $978m.
Giving vehicle
Start Small, LLC (#startsmall)
A limited liability company, not a foundation, of which he is sole member. It holds 12,080,574 Block Class B shares. He seeded it in April 2020 with about $1bn of what was then Square equity.
#startsmall giving to date
About $635m disbursed of the $1bn pledged
Total disbursed per the public Google spreadsheet Dorsey set up to track the fund, read on 12 August 2026. He committed to publishing every grant in the open when he made the pledge. The sheet is the only public accounting; its currency is not independently established.
Background
President and Chief Executive Officer, May 2007 to October 2008
Dates as recorded in Block's own proxy statement. He was removed by the board in 2008 and replaced by co-founder Evan Williams.
Chief Executive Officer, July 2015 to November 2021
He ran Twitter and Square simultaneously for more than six years, an arrangement that drew sustained investor criticism.
Director, May 2007 to May 2022
He stayed on Twitter's board for six months after resigning as chief executive and left as his term expired, during Musk's takeover attempt.
Block reported $24.19bn total net revenue and $10.36bn gross profit in 2025
Gross profit was up 17% year on year, with Cash App at $6.34bn and Square at $3.94bn. Gross payment volume was $259.6bn. Cash App had 59 million monthly transacting actives in December 2025.
9,117 bitcoin held for long-term investment, fair value $533.9m
As at 30 June 2026. The company states it holds the position because it believes "cryptocurrency is an instrument of economic empowerment that aligns with our corporate purpose". Block also holds a small operating balance to service Cash App trades.
Taught himself to program at 15 and became fixated on dispatch — couriers, ambulances and fire trucks broadcasting their positions
He has told the story repeatedly as the origin of Twitter: a childhood obsession with maps and cities, then the discovery of a public database of vehicles constantly saying where they were. In his 2010 speech at his old school he said "that early fascination with bags and maps and couriers and the constant desire to know what the people in the maps were doing became Twitter".
Wrote dispatch software in Oakland from 2000, then joined the Odeo team out of which Twitter came
He started a company in Oakland in 2000 to dispatch couriers, taxis and emergency services from the web, then approached the podcasting startup Odeo, which was interested in text messaging at the time. Odeo's founders later formed Obvious Corporation, which spun off Twitter, Inc.
Registered in Delaware on 17 June 2009 under the name Seashell, Inc.
Confirmed in the amended and restated certificate of incorporation Square filed with the SEC at its 2015 listing: "The original Certificate of Incorporation of the Corporation was filed with the office of the Secretary of State of Delaware on June 17, 2009 under the name Seashell, Inc."
Notable Coverage
26 items
Dorsey argues every company can now run as a "mini-AGI"
"The company as a mini AGI, for instance, an artificial general intelligence, because it really is."
SEC closes its Block investigation; the DOJ matter remains open with $526m accrued
Block "disputes the basis and methodology underlying the DOJ's assessment", saying it does not reflect the company's view of the merits or of an appropriate measure of loss. Negotiations are continuing.
Analyst says the AI rationale for Block's layoffs does not hold
Dorsey's position, stated in the shareholder letter, is that the decision was not driven by financial pressure: 2025 gross profit rose 17% and he described the year as a strong one.
Dorsey cuts Block by more than 40% and rebuilds it around an AI layer
"I don't think we're early to this realization. I think most companies are late... I'd rather get there honestly and on our own terms than be forced into it reactively."
New York regulator fines Block $40m and imposes an independent monitor
Superintendent Adrienne Harris said all financial institutions, traditional or crypto, must adhere to standards that protect consumers and the integrity of the financial system.
Block and its directors, Dorsey among them, are sued over Cash App compliance
Block has not conceded the claims; the special litigation committee's investigation is ongoing and the company says it cannot yet estimate a loss.
CFPB orders Block to pay $175m over Cash App fraud handling
Forty-eight state regulators fine Block $80m over anti-money-laundering failures
Dorsey winds down TBD and narrows Block's crypto ambitions
Asked about strategy, Dorsey said the focus was "making it more accessible, making sure that more people can access bitcoin, buy, sell it, obviously, but also send it peer-to-peer", and that he wanted the internet to have a native currency.
Dorsey quits the Bluesky board and says it is repeating Twitter's mistakes
"They started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off... This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made."
Delaware court dismisses the shareholder suit over the TIDAL purchase
Dorsey turns on Musk a year after backing his takeover
"No. Nor do I think he acted right after realizing his timing was bad. Nor do I think the board should have forced the sale. It all went south."
Hindenburg Research alleges Cash App inflated its user metrics and facilitated fraud
Block said it intended to "work with the SEC and explore legal action against Hindenburg Research for the factually inaccurate and misleading report they shared about our Cash App business", and that it believed the report was "designed to deceive and confuse investors".
Dorsey rolls his entire Twitter stake into Musk's takeover rather than cash out
Block completes its $29bn all-stock acquisition of Afterpay
"We're excited to welcome the Afterpay team to Block and are eager to get to work."
Square renamed Block, two days after Dorsey leaves Twitter
"We built the Square brand for our Seller business, which is where it belongs. Block is a new name, but our purpose of economic empowerment remains the same."
Dorsey resigns as Twitter's chief executive, saying the company should outgrow its founders
"I've decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders... My trust in Parag as Twitter's CEO is deep. It's his time to lead."
Dorsey sells the first tweet as an NFT for $2.9m
Square buys a majority stake in Jay-Z's TIDAL for $297m
Dorsey: "It comes down to one simple idea: finding new ways for artists to support their work." Carter: "Artists deserve better tools to assist them in their creative journey. This partnership will be a game-changer for many."
Dorsey and Jay-Z put 500 bitcoin into Btrust
Dorsey pledges $1bn — about 28% of his wealth — to #startsmall
"I'm moving $1B of my Square equity (~28% of my wealth) to #startsmall LLC to fund global COVID-19 relief."
Elliott Management's campaign to oust Dorsey ends with him keeping the job
Dorsey stayed as chief executive for a further twenty months before resigning of his own accord.
Dorsey testifies alone before the House on claims Twitter suppresses conservatives
"Let me be clear about one important and foundational fact: Twitter does not use political ideology to make any decisions... We do not shadowban anyone based on political ideology."
Square lists on the NYSE at $9 a share
Square launches Square Cash, the product that becomes Cash App
Dorsey is replaced as Twitter's chief executive by co-founder Evan Williams
Williams: "While the board of directors and the company have nothing but praise for where Jack has taken us, we also agree that the best way forward is for Jack to step into the role Chairman, and for me to become CEO."