In the introduction to 60 Minutes’ profile of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Lara Logan notes, “We were surprised to learn that Jack Dorsey already has his eye on the next job he wants: mayor of New York City.” While the interview mainly focuses on Dorsey’s latest business venture, Square, a system that lets people accept credit card payments on their smartphones, Dorsey’s mayoral ambitions are generating the most attention — though he actually announced his plan several years ago.
An April 2011 Vanity Fair profile of Dorsey first revealed that his “dream job” is to be New York’s mayor, and “He’s even spoken to Michael Bloomberg about it.” In October 2012 Dorsey and Bloomberg discussed their mutual admiration with Forbes. “Could a tech entrepreneur really be elected mayor? That question is so 2001,” said Bloomberg.
On 60 Minutes, Dorsey described his interest in the job while standing in the subway:
Jack Dorsey: What I love about New York is just the electricity I feel right away. I mean just look at us in this station. There’s just people walking everywhere and everyone.
Lara Logan: Chaos?
Jack Dorsey: It’s chaos. It’s kinda like being in a car in the middle of a thunderstorm, right. Everything is raging around you, but you’re safe inside that car. So New York feels very much to me like that.
Similarly, he told Vanity Fair’s David Kirkpatrick:
“What gets me really energized,” he says, sitting on a bench near the fountain in Washington Square, “is thinking about activity within a city. Like, even this intersection at the end of Fifth Avenue, seeing all the taxicabs turn. There’s such a rush of energy constantly coursing through.”
And while Dorsey once showed off Square Wallet, which allows users to pay participating merchants just by giving their name, to New York by buying a journalist a cappuccino, on 60 Minutes he buys Logan a latte. Dorsey is no threat to the current batch of mayoral candidates, since he doesn’t currently live in New York, but we like that he’s already staying on message.
