Jack Dorsey reportedly felt so betrayed that Instagram sold to Facebook that he deleted the app and hasn't posted since
- Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey hasn't posted to Instagram since 2012, despite being one of the app's most influential early users and a close friend of founder Kevin Systrom.
- Now, thanks to Bloomberg reporter Sarah Frier's new book, "No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram," we may know what made Dorsey leave the app: Instagram's acquisition by Facebook.
- Dorsey posted for the last time on April 9, 2012, the same day Facebook announced it was buying Instagram. According to Frier, Dorsey was upset that Systrom hadn't called him to discuss the deal, or to negotiate one with Twitter instead.
- Dorsey and Systrom had been friends since their days working at audio-sharing startup Odeo together, and Dorsey was an early investor in Instagram.
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Jack Dorsey was one of Instagram's earliest fans, but what he saw as a betrayal at the hands of its founder has kept him off the app since 2012.
According to the book "No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram" by Sarah Frier, Dorsey and Instagram founder Kevin Systrom were close friends, with the former investing in Systrom's company even before it was called Instagram. In the early 2010s, Dorsey and Twitter even attempted to buy Instagram, but Systrom declined, saying he wanted to make Instagram too expensive to be acquired, according to Frier.
While Dorsey apparently took the rejection in stride, the Dorsey-Systrom relationship appears to have soured in 2012, when Dorsey found out through the grapevine that Instagram had signed a $1 billion acquisition deal with Facebook, Twitter's biggest rival. According to Frier, Dorsey was hurt that Systrom hadn't called him to discuss the deal, or to negotiate one with Twitter instead.
According to Frier, Dorsey took it hard. He hasn't posted to his Instagram account since April 9, 2012, when he snapped a photo of an unusually empty San Francisco city bus - the morning he found out Instagram had sold to Facebook.
A spokesperson for Twitter did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.
Dorsey and Systrom met when they were early employees at Odeo, the audio and video site created by eventual Twitter cofounders Ev Williams and Noah Glass. Dorsey expected to dislike Systrom when he joined as a summer intern in the mid-2000s, but the pair ended up bonding over photography and expensive coffee, according to Frier.
Systrom and Dorsey stayed in touch even after Systrom got a full-time job at Google - he was an early proponent of Twitter (then known as Twttr) and when Systrom was working on Burbn, the precursor to Instagram, he reached out to Dorsey for guidance. Dorsey ended up putting in $25,000, and when Burbn pivoted to Instagram, Dorsey became one of the app's biggest fans, cross-posting his Instagrams to Twitter and helping the app go viral soon after it launched.
These days, it's unclear if Dorsey and Systrom have mended their friendship, but judging by Dorsey's Instagram account, it seems unlikely. Systrom, however, has remained an active Twitter user. Although he took a hiatus after leaving Instagram in 2018, he's been posting frequently over the course of the past month, sharing charts and statistics about the coronavirus outbreak.
