Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey took a dig at Facebook, calling it a “swamp of despair” in a text message with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, newly uncovered court documents. The text messages between Dorsey and Elon Musk, which were made public as part of Twitter’s pre-trial evidence collection process for Elon Musk’s breach of contract lawsuit, show how the Silicon Valley executive privately views the social network’s rival. In the April 6 text message, Dorsey wrote.
""It looks like there is another 'verified' account in the swamp of despair.""
In Dorsey’s text message, the former Twitter CEO shared a link to a screenshot of a verified Facebook account with Elon Musk’s name on it, which he appeared to be acquiring for Twitter, though the account did not actually appear to belong to Elon Musk. Elon Musk simply responded with an “aha.
Dorsey noted that the fake Facebook account also appears to be promoting cryptocurrencies, an issue Elon Musk has been critical of in the past. Elon Musk has called on Twitter and YouTube to crack down on spam accounts on those platforms that promote cryptocurrency scams using his name.
Dorsey, who has publicly mocked or criticized Facebook before, made a joke last year after Mark Zuckerberg announced he would become CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta. At the time, Dorsey responded with a dictionary definition of the new name.
He wrote on Twitter, “Meta: refers to the inner quality of the thing itself, self-reference.” He also agreed with a tweet that Zuckerberg’s plans for a “meta-universe” could lead to “the emergence of an anti-utopian corporate dictatorship.”
The Twitter co-founder also later poked fun at Facebook when a security expert shared that Facebook’s domain name system records had been hacked and the site put up for sale.
Dorsey has a long history of feuding with Facebook, and Zuckerberg even offered to buy it for $500 million in 2008 when Dorsey first became CEO of Twitter. The two also discussed the possibility of Dorsey resigning from Twitter and joining Facebook.
In court documents in Twitter’s breach-of-contract lawsuit against Elon Musk, the latter’s legal team said Dorsey told them in testimony that he told Twitter executives to use Signal to avoid using a messaging system tied to Amazon or Meta.
Dorsey also seems to have very mixed feelings when it comes to Twitter itself. In an exchange of text messages with Elon Musk before he bought Twitter, Dorsey said that Twitter was not supposed to be a company. “That was the original sin,” he said in a text message to Elon Musk.
Dorsey, a longtime friend of Elon Musk’s who is very supportive of the billionaire’s plans to buy Twitter, texted Elon Musk on April 5 when first told of his plans to join its board, saying he was very happy that Elon Musk was doing so. He wrote, “I’ve wanted Elon Musk to buy Twitter for a long time and was thrilled to learn that this was finally possible.”
Twitter is suing Elon Musk to force the billionaire to go ahead and buy the company for the agreed-upon price of $44 billion. Dorsey received an arraignment last month in a trial between Twitter and Elon Musk. The five-day trial is scheduled for Oct. 17 in the Delaware Court of Chancery.
It was one of the hundreds of text messages between Elon Musk and some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley regarding the acquisition of Twitter, including Oracle founder Larry Ellison and Reid Hoffman, co-founder of professional social networking site LinkedIn.
