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Twitter's New CEO Is Its Old CEO

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is stepping down, and Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey is taking over.

The old Twitter CEO will become the new Twitter CEO: Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey will apparently replace current head Dick Costolo, according to the company.

Costolo, who had previously been at Google, took over Twitter in October of 2010 and oversaw the company's initial public offering in September of 2013. But, despite the site's popularity with celebrities, journalists, and young people, its modest profits (the site was unprofitable for a long time) have turned off investors, which could be one reason for Costello's ousting. Twitter has also failed to grow at a rate investors would like, and it has just one fifth the active users of Facebook.

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Twitter's stock price is down about a third since late April, and it missed earnings expectations in the first quarter of this year.

What does this mean for you? Well, we're not sure yet. Twitter is planning on having a conference call later today to explain the move, but, at the moment, it looks like Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey will take back the job he was ousted from five years ago. Dorsey will serve in an interim role, at least at first.

Dorsey was popular with users and, along with Ev Williams, Biz Stone, and according to some accounts, Noah Glass, was the brains behind the founding of Twitter.

But Dorsey apparently didn't have all that much interest in pushing the company toward profitability—instead, he wanted to make it more functional first.

"It wasn't so much that the ship was sinking, but more 'Great job, Jack—we've got to up our level of experience and lay some foundation for a much bigger organization,'" Williams told Vanity Fair in 2011.

"It was like being punched in the stomach," Jack Dorsey, Twitter's cofounder, told the magazine.

In Nick Bilton's book, Hatching Twitter, Bilton claims that Dorsey's problems weren't just inexperience. He was ousted because he skipped out of work early and had odd interests, investors said.

He "habitually left around 6 PM for drawing classes, hot yoga sessions, and a course at the local fashion school," Bilton wrote. "You can either be a dressmaker or the CEO of Twitter," Williams told Dorsey, according to Bilton. "But you can't be both."