Jack Dorsey Deletes Instagram Account; Felt Betrayed When It Sold To Facebook

Former CEO and Co-founder of Twitter, now X, Jack Dorsey announced in a social media post that he has deleted his Instagram account @Jack. Such first name social media account handles are sought after and sell for thousands of dollars on the secondary market.

“Don’t know why it took me so long,” the Twitter co-founder and now Block CEO wrote on Nostr, early morning UTC Thursday. “I think I was in the first 10 accounts on the platform, and one of the first angel investors. [Instagram co-founder] Kevin [Systrom] was our intern at Odeo. When they sold to FB I stopped using it. Will be interesting to see what happens with the @name.”

Odeo, founded in 2005 by Noah Glass and Evan Williams, later reformed as the Obvious Corporation where Twitter(then known as Twttr) was birthed. Systrom reportedly bonded with Dorsey at Odeo; and both stayed in touch even after Systrom got a full-time job at Google, according to Sarah Frier’s book, “No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram.”

Dorsey was an early investor when Systrom was working on Burbn (now Instagram). He was one of the earliest fans of the app, cross-posting his Instagram posts to Twitter and helping the app go viral soon after it launched.

However according to Frier, Dorsey and Twitter's attempt in the early 2010s, to buy Instagram, was declined by Systrom who said he wanted to make the app too expensive to be acquired.

Instagram was later sold for $1 billion, to Facebook -- Twitter’s biggest rival at the time. Dorsey stopped posting to the app on April 9, 2012 -- the morning he found out about the sale.

Dorsey's decision to delete his account this week, comes just weeks after Meta launched its X clone, Threads. He retains a stake in X, after Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media company.

Facebook founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is notoriously known for trying to acquire or copy other social media apps. Initial hype around Threads has since died down as users abandoned the anti-free speech platform.

"I don't see why Threads exist," an apparently unimpressed user who tried out the app wrote on X. "We already have Gab and X."