3. Jack Dorsey

Category of Candidate: Jacks.

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey initially endorsed Musk as “the singular solution” he trusted to take over his baby. Since then, he’s seemed a bit baffled by Musk’s decisions and has publicly protested in very reserved terms. When Musk banned links that promote accounts on other social networks, Dorsey responded with comments like “why?” and “doesn’t make sense.”

Dorsey has also accused Musk and Twitter’s head of Trust and Safety of lying about past moderation practices and called for the company to release all of his old emails for the sake of transparency. All the while, Musk has seemingly taken great pains not to blame Dorsey for any of Twitter’s past sins, implying that the former CEO was used surrounded by a nasty group of people suffering from the “woke mind virus.”

If Musk asked, would Dorsey want to come back? It’s not the craziest idea. It would be quite the bit of tech theater kayfabe to have Musk spend the better part of a year trashing the house that Jack built just to bring him back. Musk could claim he got rid of all the libs who were preventing Dorsey from doing the right thing. Dorsey could mumble something.

But Dorsey’s other company, Block Inc., seems to be fairly low drama and he’s been focused on Bluesky protocol that is being pitched as a sort of decentralized version of Twitter. I don’t know if there’s much left for him at the bird app.

On Monday, Business Insider reported that Dorsey told data scientist Emily Gorcenski that he had “no choice” regarding Musk’s takeover of Twitter because it was a public company. “We should have never gone public,” Dorsey wrote in a DM. “Anyone could buy.”

Dorsey has been vocal about his regrets over taking Twitter public and a redo could give him a chance to make things right as a private company.

Of all the people on this list, Dorsey would probably be the wisest choice for replacing Elon. And that’s why Musk probably won’t do it.