Jack Dorsey's Forgotten Double-Duty at Twitter Inc (TWTR) and Square (SQ)

Jack Dorsey doesn't get enough credit. The co-founder and current CEO of Twitter Inc (NYSE: TWTR) and the founder and CEO of Square ( SQ) is pulling double-CEO duty -- and doing a bang-up job at both companies.

On Tuesday, word came down that Twitter would be added to the vaunted S&P 500 index, taking the spot of agricultural chemicals giant Monsanto Co. ( MON). Just a few years ago, the market was publicly wondering if Twitter could remain a sustainable, profitable company.

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"It feels like they've gone from an also-ran at best to about to be added to the S&P 500," says Scott Kessler, equity analyst at CFRA. Kessler covers both TWTR and SQ.

Meanwhile, Square, the mobile payments company Dorsey founded in the depths of the recession in 2009, is also thriving. Square shares are up 163 percent in the last year, while TWTR stock is up 118 percent; in other words, an equally weighted portfolio of Dorsey-led companies in the last 12 months would have netted you 140 percent gains.

The fact of the matter is Dorsey's incredible balancing act doesn't get enough attention, not from the media, Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.

Twitter, with and without Jack. Oracle ( ORCL) founder Larry Ellison was once asked how he knew Steve Jobs was a good CEO. He had a simple way of putting it. "We've seen Apple ( AAPL) with Steve Jobs, without Steve Jobs and then with Steve Jobs," Ellison said, sketching with his finger a stock price that went up, then down, then up again when Jobs returned.

Dorsey's dramatic history at Twitter is much the same story. As Jobs did, Dorsey took the company from an idea in his head to incorporation, success and rapid growth. Twitter was Dorsey's idea, and as co-founder, he helped launch it in 2006.

After his company shot to success and was on an explosive glide path to cultural permanence, Dorsey was ousted as CEO in 2008, as it overtook MySpace in traffic. Investors didn't feel he had the management chops needed for such a company.

Sound familiar?

Riding the secular rise of social media and the mobile boom, TWTR stock went public in 2013, shooting from $25.94 per share to more than $74 in a matter of months.

"Then the questions and the problems started to kind of creep up," Kessler says. These problems regarded profitability, slowing user growth, devolving advertiser relationships and fake accounts, to name a few.

Investors turned to Dick Costolo, who took over as CEO in 2011, took Twitter public and lasted until 2015 -- when problems had gotten out of hand. TWTR stock fell below $30 a share and seemed doomed to decline below its initial public offering price.

The parallel careers of Jobs and Dorsey. Within months of his departure, Jobs founded another company, NeXT Computer, and would soon acquire and develop a company that became Pixar. Dorsey also quickly moved on, founding Square four months after being pushed out as Twitter's CEO.

By 2015, Dorsey was preparing to take his mobile payments company public. He had proven his competence as a visionary, product designer, manager and pleaser of investors. With things in dire straits, the Twitter board desperately wooed him, bringing him on first as interim CEO, then permanent CEO.

After Pixar's wildly successful 1995 IPO, which Jobs led as CEO, Apple followed a similar strategy in 1997.

Dorsey's TWTR return. When Jobs returned to Apple, it was three months away from running out of money. When Dorsey returned to Twitter, its business model was unsustainable and its user growth had gone from roughly 50 percent annually in 2013 to sequential declines in just two years.

Dorsey, like Jobs, slashed unnecessary expenditures, and this meant layoffs. Dorsey dramatically cut the engineering staff and reined in stock options packages, which had gotten extraordinarily excessive under Costolo.

These were not popular moves internally, but they were necessary.

Then, both Jobs and Dorsey focused intently on their love: the product itself. Dorsey began tweaking Twitter, which was seen as a stagnating platform.

He made it so links no longer counted against the 140-character limit, making media more shareable. He changed the star-shaped "favorite" button to a heart-shaped "like" button, giving things a more personal appeal. Dorsey would soon discontinue Vine to focus on the core service and later double the character limit to 280 to encourage deeper content and a better user experience.

The recent success of Twitter and Square. Though it required patience, Dorsey focused on improving Twitter's product, believing the rest would follow. Opening the app to change, he added the "Moments" tab, secured streaming deals with the National Football League, Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer, reduced bot accounts and began working to silence hate speech and harassment.

Revenue growth, after decelerating from 111 percent in 2014 to -3 percent in 2017, is expected to jump 18 percent in 2018.

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In the meantime, Twitter became a brand Americans hear daily as the medium of choice for President Donald Trump.

At Square, Dorsey has followed a similar playbook, focusing constantly on ease of use, simplicity, design and opportunistic change. Adjusted revenue soared from $160 million in 2013 to nearly $1 billion in 2017, with Wall Street expecting 47 percent growth -- an acceleration from last year's 43 percent expansion -- in 2018 to $1.44 billion.

"Square has just done a tremendous job," Kessler says. "They identified an opportunity to simplify point-of-sale hardware, where there are a lot of vendors."

This has allowed Square to gain market share with its core customer: small businesses. Its quick embrace of bitcoin also helped SQ stock outperform in recent months due to the unknown potential in cryptocurrency.

"Dorsey has accomplished Herculean-like results at both Square and the Twitter turnaround story over the last 12 to 18 months," says Daniel Ives, chief strategy officer and head of technology research at GBH Insights. "Many of the bears were heavily betting against him in his dual roles."

Recently, that has not been a smart idea.

Elon who? Jack Dorsey has engineered miracles in a short amount of time at not one but two public companies that he runs simultaneously.

After considering the scope of these public businesses -- each worth more than $24 billion -- he is literally peerless today.

Yet despite Dorsey's successes and similarities to Steve Jobs, Elon Musk -- Tesla's ( TSLA) CEO who also runs private companies SpaceX and The Boring Company -- is usually acclaimed as the modern-day Silicon Valley wunderkind most in Jobs's vein.

Musk's bold visions, confidence and love for dramatic product rollouts certainly mimic Jobs's. Where Musk abjectly fails, though, and where Dorsey has succeeded is in execution. Jobs's most enviable quality as a businessman was his "reality distortion field," which enabled him to set and meet seemingly impossible deadlines with elite, groundbreaking products.

In contrast, Elon's word is worth less than ever on Wall Street because he sometimes more approximates Elizabeth Holmes -- a desperate, self-centered huckster selling a vision -- than someone who can follow through.

For his boasts, quixotic promises, oft-broken timelines and cryptic product teasers, Musk the Showman turns to Twitter, where he enjoys nearly 22 million followers. Dorsey has 4.2 million -- he allows the product, and the numbers that come with it, to speak for him.

Indeed, this is a snapshot in time, and equating Dorsey's accomplishments to the incredible stock charts of Square and Twitter over the last 12 months is hardly intelligible. Both could easily be overvalued at this juncture.

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But it is time to recognize something. Jack Dorsey, tech visionary, product guru and multi-timing CEO, is not Steve Jobs. But he can execute and he deserves some respect.

John Divine is an investing reporter for U.S. News & World Report, where he covers financial markets and the economy, with a focus on individual stock analysis. He has been an investor himself for over 10 years, and has been writing professionally about stocks and investing for the last five years. He previously wrote about the stock market for The Motley Fool and InvestorPlace, and his work has appeared on Yahoo! Finance, MSN Money, and AOL DailyFinance. He graduated from Appalachian State University in 2011 with a bachelor's degree in finance and banking. At Appalachian, he was a member of the Bowden Investment Group, a team of students that ran a real-money portfolio worth over $100,000. You can follow him on Twitter or give him the Tip of the Century at jdivine@usnews.com.