In Silicon Valley, tech founders embody all of the industry’s highest values—much like Greek gods. Someone like Dorsey, who goes on silent meditation retreats, dresses in couture costumes, runs two companies at the same time, and dates supermodels, is the epitome of “making it.” For a long time, Wall Street really couldn’t argue with the “cult of the founder” philosophy, as it’s called, as tech companies grew exponentially, reaching valuations of more than a trillion dollars and making everyone holding onto those rocket ships insanely rich. Even when tech entered its backlash phase a few years ago and page views or new user sign-ups started to fall, tech CEOs simply changed the metrics investors were told to follow based on whichever number was rising that quarter, so market caps continued to grow and the Street continued to make money. People like Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, Elizabeth Holmes, Travis Kalanick, and Adam Neumann were likened to sagacious geniuses with a few peculiarities. Their eccentricities were simply brushed aside as investors counted their billions.

Yet in recent years, as one start-up after another has fallen under the weight of its own bullshit, the cult of the founder has given way to a much more realistic reality.

Holmes, of Theranos, touted herself as a green-juice-drinking Dalai Lama-like leader who was inspired to start one of her blood-testing technologies after her uncle died of cancer “too soon.” Yet in reality, she wasn’t that close with her uncle, he passed away years after she launched the blood-testing company, and she was about as compassionate a leader as the head of the Geheime Staatspolizei. It turned out the entire technology behind Theranos’s famed Edison machine was digital snake oil, leading the company’s value, once more than $9 billion, to fall to less than zero. Neumann, the abnormal founder of WeWork, walked around the office barefoot like a sage from Nepal, drank shots of caviar in the morning to “revitalize himself,” and slapped himself in the face in high-level meetings in lieu of coffee after a rollicking evening of partying, according to an executive who witnessed this. Neumann also told people he would live forever and become the world’s first trillionaire. Yet, mere months after he proclaimed that WeWork was worth $47 billion, it turned out that almost every metric imaginable was exaggerated, and that the real value of WeWork was 80 percent lower, around $8 billion. Kalanick, the aggro cofounder of Uber, was seen as the next Jeff Bezos in business until the dam cracked and revealed that Kalanick was allowing managers to harass employees without consequence; that under his supervision, the company was subverting local laws; and that he was running Uber with the professionalism of the leaders of Pi Kappa Phi. Before he was ousted as CEO, Uber was expected to go public valued at more than $120 billion. Instead, the company was worth $40 billion less, and has continued to fall ever since.

While Dorsey is adored by a large swath of his employees, and by many in the public after announcing this month that he was donating $1 billion, around 28% of his total wealth, to relief programs related to coronavirus research, joining a swath of other celebrities and tech titans—including Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Oprah, and Rihanna—who are donating millions to help coronavirus relief and research efforts, some outsiders (especially on Wall Street) believe that though Dorsey is clearly kind and compassionate when it comes to people, when it comes to running a company and the stories he tells about himself, he is no different. He shares a number of similarities with some of the recent founders who have fallen from grace. Several former board members and high-level executives at Twitter (who have since become apostates of Dorsey), for example, have pointed out to me how even his morning ritual is full of holes and is not too dissimilar to Holmes’s and Neumann’s rituals. As for the 45 total minutes Dorsey allegedly spends in his 220-degree sauna at night (which he breaks up into three separate stints), two World Sauna Championship competitors (yes, that’s a thing) collapsed after spending six minutes in a sauna only 10 degrees warmer than Dorsey’s (which is already hotter than boiling water). After being dragged out, the competitors were treated for severe burns, and one of the men died. Then there is Dorsey’s assertion that he is running both publicly traded companies while he works from home two days a week.

The media has spent the past decade comparing Dorsey to the second coming of Steve Jobs.

While being philanthropic is clearly a sign of Dorsey’s altruism, his leadership style at Twitter has rubbed employees, everyday users, and investors the wrong way. The actor Seth Rogen has been vociferous that Dorsey has allowed hate speech and white supremacists to invade the social network and, in turn, society. After speaking extensively with Dorsey, Rogen tweeted, “I’ve reached a conclusion: the dude simply does not seem to give a fuck.” Since Dorsey announced his $1 billion charitable efforts, numerous people have voiced the concern that while it is wonderful that Dorsey is giving away part of his fortune to help people in need, and to fight COVID-19, those efforts do not negate the lackadaisical steps by Dorsey to stop Twitter from being the hotbed of hate speech and division around the globe. For Dorsey, according to numerous people close to him, he doesn’t blame Twitter for all the vitriol, rather, he says that the platform is simply “a mirror to society.” Which seems to be a ridiculous argument, as other social networks, like Pinterest, Snap, and even Instagram, are not full of so much hatred between users.