Dorsey was born on November 19, 1976, in St. Louis, Missouri. As a teenager he taught himself to write dispatch-routing software, a hobby that grew out of a fascination with how cities move buses, taxis, and couriers; a version of his code reportedly stayed in use by real dispatch companies for years afterward. He also became known for finding a security flaw in a New York City taxi dispatch system, an episode later cited as an early marker of his technical ability. Dorsey enrolled at the University of Missouri-Rolla in 1995, transferred to New York University two years later, and left NYU one semester short of graduating to pursue software work full time.

Dorsey’s breakthrough came in 2006, when he, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass built a short-message service inside the podcasting company Odeo. The idea, originally tested internally on Blackberry devices, launched publicly as Twitter and quickly grew into one of the most influential communication platforms in the world. Dorsey served as Twitter’s first CEO until 2008, when he was replaced by Williams and moved into the chairman role, before returning as CEO for a second stint from 2015 to 2021.

In 2009, Dorsey co-founded Square with Jim McKelvey, building a card-reader device that let small merchants accept credit cards through a phone. Square went public in 2015, later expanded into consumer finance through Cash App, acquired a majority stake in the music-streaming service Tidal in 2021, and rebranded as Block in December 2021 to reflect a broader ambition spanning payments, banking, and bitcoin infrastructure. Dorsey stepped down as Twitter CEO in November 2021 and exited his Twitter holding when Elon Musk acquired the company in 2022. In February 2026, as Block’s chairman and chief executive (a title he holds as “Block Head”), he cut roughly 40 percent of the company’s workforce, betting that AI tools would let a smaller team run the business; the stock jumped about 19 percent the next trading day.

Dorsey does not draw the kind of annual income most people associate with a company founder. Both at Twitter and at Block he has taken a token cash salary rather than a market-rate executive package, and he has requested no annual bonus or new stock awards in recent years. What functions as his “earnings” in any given year is mostly the paper gain or loss on the Block shares he already owns, plus occasional proceeds when he sells a portion of his stake, such as roughly $80 million he realized from a Square share sale in 2018.

Twitter paid Dorsey a symbolic salary of $1.40 a year during his second stint as CEO, a nod to the platform’s original 140-character limit; he had taken no compensation at all in earlier years. At Block, his salary has been set at $2.75 a year, roughly double the Twitter figure, echoing the switch to a 280-character limit, with no cash bonus or fresh equity grants attached. His real financial position comes from ownership: recent SEC filings put his economic stake in Block at roughly 8 percent, and his Class B shares, which carry ten votes each, give him voting control well beyond that economic share. He also held a significant Twitter stake, reported to be worth close to $1 billion, that he exited when Musk’s $44 billion acquisition closed in 2022.

There is no reliable public record of Dorsey signing a personal endorsement deal, brand ambassadorship, or paid sponsorship of the kind seen with athletes or entertainers. His public income is tied entirely to the companies he founded and led, not to outside endorsement contracts, so this category does not meaningfully apply to him.

Twitter (later X) and Block (formerly Square) remain the two pillars of Dorsey’s business career. Block’s Cash App has become a major growth driver, and Block took majority ownership of the music-streaming platform Tidal in 2021, part of a push to link artists directly to bitcoin-based payments. Dorsey is also one of bitcoin’s most vocal corporate advocates: Block holds roughly 9,000 bitcoin in its own corporate treasury as of early 2026, and Dorsey has said he personally dollar-cost-averages into bitcoin on a regular basis, though he has never disclosed the size of his personal holdings. Away from Block, Dorsey helped fund and launch Bluesky, a decentralized social-media project that spun out of Twitter in 2019, serving on its board until he stepped down in May 2024 amid reported disagreements over the platform’s direction.

Dorsey’s best-documented real estate is a compound in the Sea Cliff neighborhood of San Francisco. He paid $10 million in 2012 for a midcentury modern house on a bluff overlooking the bay, then paid $21.9 million in an off-market deal that closed in late 2018 for the house next door, at the time the highest price ever recorded for a Sea Cliff property. Combined, the two homes total roughly 7,300 square feet on about 1.2 acres. Public reporting has not documented a subsequent sale, so this appears to remain his primary residence, though as with most privately held real estate that cannot be confirmed with certainty from public records alone. Separately, Dorsey bought a Hollywood Hills house for $4.225 million in 2018 and sold it about a year later for $4.625 million; that property is a former holding, not a current one. No other specific high-value personal asset, such as a yacht, jet, or major art collection, is reliably documented in public sources.