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Twitter stock pops on report that CEO Jack Dorsey is expected to step down

Yahoo Finance Live's Julie Hyman, Brian Sozzi, and Brian Cheung run down Twitter's upward stock performance amid reports alleging CEO Jack Dorsey will be stepping down.

Video transcript

JULIE HYMAN: There is breaking news right now. There's a report on CNBC that the CEO Jack Dorsey is expected to step down. They're citing sources. And there's no more information than that at this point. So, again, CNBC is reporting, citing unnamed sources, that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is expected to step down.

The shares are higher by 11%. Now, of course, a couple of notable things about Jack Dorsey. He is not only the CEO of Twitter, he is also the CEO of Square. And by and large, that company has performed much better. In part, Dorsey also a well-known crypto advocate, and he has integrated crypto acceptance into the business over at Square.

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With Twitter, there have been some sort of strategic changes that he has made, but nothing huge, right? And even though Twitter has continued to grow, there still remain a lot of questions about monetization on that platform. And you can see Square's shares are also trading higher by about 3.8% right now. Brian Cheung, really interesting here that we are getting this report.

Again, we don't know if it's true, we don't know if it's going to happen, but obviously, we are seeing movement in the stocks based on this.

BRIAN CHEUNG: Yeah. And for what it's worth, this is something that has been-- if it is indeed the case that he will be stepping down as CEO-- would be the ending of what is a multi-year story of activist investors and just pundits at large questioning the role of Jack Dorsey as both the CEO of Twitter and Square at the same time, not unlike some of the criticism that Elon Musk has also faced about his roles in multiple ventures about whether or not one person can have the bandwidth to manage two large companies-- especially in this case-- that are both publicly traded at the same time, especially in the case of Twitter, which appears to be getting more of the premarket movement.

There's been a lot of questions specifically about the ability to monetize what everyone knows as a popular platform but has been a bit of a trickier puzzle in terms of turning it into more of a cash cow to the comparison of the likes of a Facebook or even a Snapchat in many cases.

And we've seen that even in just over the past few months, we've seen the unveiling and then the unfurling of certain products, like Fleets, where you can have that Instagram-like feature that they ultimately ended up nuking in the summer of this year. But then you also have these Super Follows. And it's just been clunky, the roll out of all these different types of products on Twitter that have tried to add an element of revenue to the model beyond advertising.

I think maybe that's one reason why you're seeing more premarket movement in Twitter, whereas Square-- although it is up about 3% in premarket movement, four minutes ahead of the bell-- maybe that's the reason why you're getting a bit more accentuation in that stock as opposed to in Square.

BRIAN SOZZI: Well, let's call it like it is, guys. Jack Dorsey hasn't gotten it done at Twitter. Where is this subscription product that's generating large sums of revenue? How have they countered just the hate speech and the various problems they have had on this platform? I would say they haven't. And thirdly, I just think his heart is with Square in the crypto community, so I'm not surprised if he just continues to lead that company.

JULIE HYMAN: Yeah. Well, we'll see. And we're going to keep following this, bring you any further developments. Again, CNBC's David Faber reporting that Jack Dorsey going to be stepping down as CEO of Twitter.