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Jack Dorsey, the man who invented Twitter, has not been invited to President-elect Donald Trump’s tech summit taking place tomorrow in New York, according to several sources close to the situation.
That’s unusual, given how important tweeting has been to Trump, who has never met an exclamation point he did not employ on the social communications network. His persistent, often specious and very aggressive tweeting has been an important medium through which the candidate and soon the leader of the U.S. has been communicating with his constituency.
More to the point: It has also been a clever way to bypass the press and drive his opponents nuts. I have called Trump a tweet savant before and stand by that description, no matter how much it irks people.
Twitter’s Dorsey is one of the only high-profile Silicon Valley public CEOs not invited to the event. Those expected to attend include Alphabet CEO Larry Page, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and leaders from a range of the most powerful tech companies.
Dorsey told me in person at our Code Commerce event a week ago that he was not invited, but then said he did not know. That was not a surprise since a lot of invites, such as to Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, who is not going due to travel, came late last week.
But there is still a day left for Dorsey, so maybe the invite is delayed in the mail! Get on it, Peter Thiel, there’s still time!
At the Code Commerce event, Dorsey said a lot about Trump and his relentless tweeting.
As Kurt Wagner wrote about Dorsey’s feelings on enabling it:
“Complicated,” he said. “I feel very proud of the role of the service and what it stands for and everything that we’ve done, and that continues to accelerate every single day. Especially as it’s had such a spotlight on it through his usage and the election.”
“The complicated part,” Dorsey continued, “is just what does this mean to have a direct line to how he’s thinking in real time and to see that.”
“Having the president-elect on our service, using it as a direct line of communication, allows everyone to see what’s on his mind in the moment. I think that’s interesting, I think it’s fascinating, I haven’t seen that before. So we’re definitely entering a new world where everything is on the surface and we can all see it in real time and we can all have conversations about it.”
It might be a mixed blessing that Dorsey was not invited to the tech summit, since he does not have to look weak by attending and then saying nothing — like all the other tech CEOs — about the range of pretty low blows Trump has made on the sector. And he did not have to choose not to go, which might have made him a target of Trump, who likes to smack companies for their foibles on, well, Twitter. No Boeing for Jack!
Despite the snub, sources at Twitter said the company is trying to figure out how to deal with the new administration from a policy point of view and will work with it on issues it can find common ground on.
But expect a bumpy ride, since there is precious little of that since Trump has been hostile to immigration reform, encryption and a range of social issues that Twitter has strongly endorsed.
One interesting bit of timing: Dorsey did a Q&A session with Edward Snowden, who political exile in Russia for leaking classified government documents to the media about U.S. surveillance efforts, this morning on Twitter. Doing the talk was a strong posture for Jack to take right before the Trump tech summit, giving platform for Snowden to say government surveillance is unconstitutional and Twitter was the only social media that didn’t participate in PRISM. And it’s just the kind of thing that would cause Trump to freak out on Twitter.
Twitter has also been the only tech company to explicitly refused to participate in the creation of any Muslim database, which Trump has threatened to create. Since I am known for being tough on tech leaders, let me just say on this on the flips side: Kudos to Jack Dorsey for that.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
