Jack Dorsey pledges $1B to aid in coronavirus relief efforts

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that he is pledging $1 billion of his stocks in Square to support multiple causes including coronavirus relief and basic universal income efforts.

Video transcript

- Some big news last night coming out of San Francisco. And one man, who is very busy, he has two jobs, Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square. And he has become very wealthy on both of those companies. And, Melody Hahm, he is making a big bet, donation, whatever you want to call it, on coronavirus relief.

MELODY HAHM: Yes.

- The headline seems incredible, a billion dollars, a third of his wealth. Is this, indeed, like real money that's going to be put to work right away? How does it work?

MELODY HAHM: Well, according to the Google Doc that he did tweet out with that announcement, yes, to your point, it's about 28% of his net worth. That's about 19.8 million shares of Square, so it's all equity that he's transferring to an LLC and that he will start giving out to different sorts of nonprofits, relief efforts.

According to the doc, there's only one donation that's been made so far. It's $100,000 to a food relief service, especially for vulnerable kids and older populations who, typically, don't have access to healthy food on a consistent basis. That is actually being helm by Leonardo DiCaprio and Laurene Powell Jobs, so it's definitely a kind of cultish tech community that's banding together for this effort.

And, you know, you tease it as a UBI play. What I want to point out is that, in addition to making these sorts of initial investments into, perhaps, on the ground, frontline efforts, Dorsey's intention is to invest in girls' health and education as well as universal basic income, which, to your point, had originally been laughed about, right? When Andrew Yang first ran with that being the central tenet of his platform, a lot of folks were saying, oh, my goodness.

$2 to $4 trillion to give everyone $1,000 check? Well, what's the stimulus package, right? As Mitt Romney, as a bunch of other lawmakers, now are starting to propose this additional sort of stimulus that Americans can actually have money in their hands and spend it and put it back into the economy, I think it's one that Silicon Valley had been shouting from the rooftops about for a long time, including the likes of Y Combinator Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, which is very ironic to a certain degree because they're the ones who are kind of displacing a lot of those jobs in the first place. But, perhaps because they have that front row seat, they understand the ramifications of the tech community.

- And let me just jump in and add to what Melody said. You know, one really interesting piece of context here I think is let's remember the battle that was going on at Twitter right before kind of everyone got locked in home, before coronavirus, was that, you know, supposedly people wanted Jack Dorsey out from Twitter. Activists, investors came in.

Now, a deal was reached with Elliott Management that is keeping Dorsey at the helm. So he's still CEO of both Twitter and Square, but the reason that his money, in this case, is coming from his Square equity-- and he explained that publicly-- is, you know, more of my equity. I have more shares of Square.

And, for me, this kind of story is more of a Square story than Twitter. Although it's really Jack Dorsey personally story. I think the gist of it, if you wanted to play the prediction game, I think still, in the next year or two, Jack Dorsey will no longer be CEO of one of those companies. And, if I had to bet, he's more likely to stay on as CEO of Square than of Twitter.