Jack Dorsey is no longer CEO at Block, instead he's the 'Block Head'

Jack Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder and current Block CEO, is no longer the digital payments firm’s 'chief executive officer'. Instead, he chooses to use the title of ‘Block Head' at the company, along with the chairman and co-founder titles. And if that sounds a little wacky, Dorsey fans have nothing to fret, really. His roles and responsibilities at Block - formerly known as Square - remains unchanged with the company calling it only a ‘semantic change’.

Block announced the change in a filing with US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Saturday. The new title “Block Head and Chairperson” becomes effective immediately, but Block’s official page still lists his title as CEO (at the time of filing this piece).

“The change happened at Dorsey’s request,” according to the filing, which added that Block’s bylaws also no longer require that the company to have an officer with the title of CEO and President, the filing said. This would mean that anyone who succeeds Dorsey in his role could also be called Block Head. 

Block, formerly Square, is an American financial services and digital payments company based in San Francisco, California. The company was founded in 2009 by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey and launched its first platform in 2010. The company's namesake product for small businesses is still titled "Square".

With this change in title, Dorsey follows in the footsteps of tech billionaire and Tesla CEO Elon Musk who himself gave the title of "Technoking” of Tesla in 2021. While replying to Dorsey on Twitter, Musk called Dorsey's new title 'fire'.

In 2021, chief financial officer Zach Kirkhorn’s new position in Tesla was also changed to “Master of Coin.” 

Dorsey has long preferred titles such as "head" or "lead" to designations like "senior vice president." He Tweeted, “Titles, like "CEO", get in the way of doing the right thing. Respect to the people who ignore titles, and fight like hell for what is right.”

Management educator and author Ludo Van der Heyden, said that “The title Chief Executive Officer is something of a misnomer. The task of a CEO is not wholly or even primarily about execution.  In fact, when the CEO starts to “do” things, and starts becoming more “active,” that is usually when a company gets into trouble.” 

Meanwhile, Dorsey, former CEO of microblogging site Twitter, made headlines last week too, when he criticised the company’s board in a series of tweets, as the group is now evaluating a takeover bid from Elon Musk. Earlier, Dorsey responded to another tweet citing what he called a “Silicon Valley proverb”: “Good boards don’t create good companies, but a bad board will kill a company every time.”

Dorsey still sits on Twitter’s board but plans to leave once his term expires at the 2022 meeting of shareholders, which is scheduled for late May.