The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and co-founder & CEO of Square, speaks during the crypto-currency conference Bitcoin 2021 Convention at the Mana Convention Center in Miami, Florida, on June 4, 2021. (Photo by Marco BELLO / AFP) (Photo by MARCO BELLO/AFP via Getty Images)

In the summer of 2023, Jack Dorsey was deathly bored, stupendously rich, and spending way too much time listening to podcasts featuring fringe presidential aspirant Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Dorsey, who had recently opted to keep his $1 billion stake in Elon Musk’s Twitter, was nominally the C.E.O. of Block, his payments company that he had renamed from Square as a way to explore his passion for Bitcoin. But his emerging enthusiasm was presidential politics—in particular, supporting a pro-crypto candidate like R.F.K. At one point, he planned to make a donation to Kennedy’s super PAC on the order of $5 million… in Bitcoin.