Dorsey’s tastes—minimalist design, severe diets—mirror the Twitter aesthetic. “Constraint inspires creativity,” he says. Illustration by Hellovon

Jack Dorsey, the tech entrepreneur, takes the No. 1 bus to work, and he likes to catch the 7:06. It carries him nearly from one side of San Francisco to the other—down California Street almost to Market. A ride costs two dollars, but Dorsey has a monthly pass, so the actual price, he told me on a recent commute, is closer to a dollar seventy-five. “If you buy it in bulk, it saves you a little bit of money,” he explained. As we got on, he added, “I love the bus. It’s consistent, and it runs every few minutes. But it’s also express. If I took another bus, it’d be stopping.” The offices of Square, his mobile payment-processing service, just moved. He used to follow his bus ride with a pleasant twenty-minute walk down Mission to the San Francisco Chronicle Building, where Square rented office space; now his commute ends with a short ride on a Muni train to Square’s new headquarters, which have a panoramic view of the city. When we got to the Muni stop, Dorsey, who is thirty-six, pointed it out with the excitement of a six-year-old.

Dorsey loves cities and the way movement within them can be charted and broken down into millions of parts. A city is a system that is at once flexible and stable, searchable and random. He expressed a similar interest in ant communities and aspen trees. “I really like any colony-based structure, where you have a strong dependence on a network,” he said. “Aspen trees grow in groups. If one of them dies, they all suffer. I think humans have the same thing, though it’s not as much on the surface.” He likes to draw ferns. (In his twenties, he studied botanical illustration.) “They’re a single structure that tends to repeat itself,” he said. “They’re fractal.” Exotic as these enthusiasms are, they seem suspiciously apt for the creator of Twitter, a service defined by its “strong dependence on a network.” As a thinker, Dorsey seems at once earnest and improbably coherent.

Dorsey, who is six feet tall and narrow of frame, sat in the back of the bus. He likes to observe other commuters and silently perform market research. Who is on a smartphone or a tablet, and who is just staring off into space? “I saw the rise of Instagram here,” he said. “I saw the rise of Vine and Snapchat, and how many more people were using Facebook versus Twitter, and it’s amazing. Like, look—anyone reading magazines, newspapers, books?” The bus ride also allows him to check his account on Twitter, which he helped found, in 2006. His Twitter handle, @Jack, was the twelfth account in the system, but, because the first eleven were tests, he is actually the first of the service’s half-billion users.

Bridges are another of his passions. He recently bought a modern house with a view of the Golden Gate, for ten million dollars. He commemorated the purchase with a lofty tweet: “ ‘I need the sea because it teaches me.’—Pablo Neruda.” Dorsey says that he is less interested in individual poems than in “getting something down to its essence, the economy of words.” He is a techno aesthete in the manner of Steve Jobs: Dorsey, too, is a college dropout, a taker of long walks, and a guy whose father liked to tinker. And, just as Jobs, with his Issey Miyake turtlenecks, tried to embody Apple’s sleek functionalism, Dorsey’s tastes are self-consciously in synch with the design of Twitter. “Constraint inspires creativity” is one of his credos. Formerly a vegan—too much beta-carotene turned his skin orange—he is now on the Paleo diet, which forbids refined sugar and grains. When he was a teen-ager, Dorsey told me, he read a book about tea ceremonies and was impressed by the Japanese precept of wabi-sabi, which holds that the greatest beauty comes from organization with a dash of disorder. “The monks rake up leaves, then they sprinkle a few leaves back,” he explained.

On the bus, Dorsey opened an iPad Mini. Everything he reads, works on, or thinks about resides either in the tablet’s memory or in the Cloud. Twitter—inspired by the text message—is all about immediacy and mobility, and so is Dorsey. He carries no briefcase or folder, and has no desk at work. In my visits with him, in the course of several months, I never saw him handle a piece of paper. When people give him books, he says, he gives them away, then downloads the e-book, which he usually deletes from his iPad after he’s finished. He once hoped to have a big library, but he prefers this: what good is information if you can’t have access to it whenever you like? He owns a Leica, but mostly takes pictures with the iPhone. “The best camera is the one you carry with you,” he says. He gets about a hundred e-mails a day and culls them nightly. “I keep my address pretty private,” he says. “That keeps it down, because it’s such a burden.” This obsession with streamlining helped Dorsey create Square, whose first product was a credit-card reader that attaches to mobile devices through a headphone jack. Square technology, he hopes, will one day kill the cash register, simplifying commerce the way Twitter simplifies online communication.

As our bus bounced along, news helicopters were circling over City Hall. The previous day, the Supreme Court had voted to uphold gay marriage—a particularly big deal in San Francisco. Dorsey, who is a liberal, later tweeted, “Accept people everywhere.” But he was even more excited about Wendy Davis, a Texas state senator who had just held an eleven-hour filibuster in Austin, in an attempt to block new abortion restrictions. Her protest caught the mainstream press by surprise. The Texas fight was a local eruption of an issue of national interest, which is where Twitter’s advantage as an information-spreading organization kicks in. While Davis spoke, more than half a million supporters sent out tweets with the hashtag #StandWithWendy. Tweeters read one another’s tweets and retweeted them, making Davis’s pink sneakers famous in the process. They also disseminated a picture indicating that Texas Republicans had not brought the bill to a vote until after a midnight deadline. Dorsey, who has 2.4 million followers, retweeted some of the images. Cumulatively, Twitter established a powerful account of the filibuster; it lacked the coherence of a good newspaper analysis, but it was more visceral. One piece of the mosaic was provided by a tweet from President Barack Obama’s account: “Something special is happening in Austin tonight.”

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Late last year, Twitter, at Dorsey’s urging, bought Vine, which allows the user to attach a short video—six seconds or less—to Twitter posts. During the filibuster, thousands of users did so. “That was the first time I really saw Vine in action at an event like that,” Dorsey said. He then said something that sounded like a sponsored tweet: “Twitter has this unique ability to bring you closer to whatever you care about the most.” He makes such sculpted observations repeatedly. At another point, he told me, “Twitter is about moving words. Square is about moving money.”

The tweets about Davis’s speech were overwhelmingly supportive—the service’s users often champion liberal causes. Dorsey added a dollop of self-congratulation to the coverage: “I am so proud of all the people using Twitter and Vine.” Nevertheless, he insists that Twitter is neither liberal nor conservative; it’s a public utility, like water or electricity. “I like technology that is unbiased,” he says. His goal in life, however, is a frankly progressive one: by making information freer, he hopes to make the world fairer, kinder, and nicer. (Twitter is blocked in China, Syria, and Iran.)