Global roundup: Jack Dorsey exits Twitter board as Zoom, Snapchat shares lose value

It’s another Friday in the life and we know you’re pumped up to step back from work and get some good rest.

As you prepare for all of that, we believe it’s important to share Global Roundup with you. Because we understand you’re busy, we’re bringing back exciting updates across the globe that you missed during the week.

From Jack Dorsey’s exit from the Twitter board to Snap’s shares taking a plunge, this edition of Global Roundup is loaded!

Let’s get into these and more updates:

Jack Dorsey exits the Twitter board

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s time at the company has come to an end. Dorsey stepped down from Twitter’s board of directors Wednesday, a change that’s effective as of the company’s shareholders’ meeting.

Dorsey, according to Techcrunch, had already begun to distance himself from the social media platform he co-founded, leaving Twitter’s chief executive role late last year to focus on his fintech company, Block, formerly known as Square.

It wasn’t a surprise that Dorsey didn’t stand for reinstatement to the panel — in November he said he would step down as CEO as well as leave the board when his term expired. But Dorsey’s exit marks the first time in Twitter’s history that none of its co-founders is working at the company or sitting on the board.

Twitter shareholders voted on a number of issues on Wednesday but didn’t weigh in on the biggest change confronting the San Francisco-based company: a looming buyout by billionaire Elon Musk. Twitter’s board accepted an offer from Musk in late April to take the company private for about $44 billion. The shareholder vote on whether to approve the deal will take place at a later date that hasn’t yet been announced.

Musk, the world’s richest person, has pledged dramatic changes at Twitter once he takes over, and the current board isn’t expected to stay in place once he takes the company private.

Also declining to stand for re-election was Robert Zoellick, former president of the World Bank, who has been a Twitter director since 2018. Twitter board member Patrick Pichette, Google’s former finance chief, was re-elected. Twitter’s other seven director seats weren’t up for renewal this year.

Zoom sustains expansion plans

Zoom Video Communications Inc. has offered a glimpse of optimism that it can expand beyond its consumer-friendly video software that helped the company to a pandemic boom. But, investors who have soured on Zoom aren’t entirely convinced.

According to a Bloomberg report, the software maker projected revenue would increase about 10% in the current period, better than analysts’ estimates, but still its slowest quarterly sales growth. The shares initially jumped 21% in extended trading after the company announced results, though they gave up most of the gains and were up only 2.4% in early trading in New York on Tuesday.

While Zoom became ubiquitous during the pandemic as a tool for people to stay in touch with family and friends, Chief Executive Officer Eric Yuan now is focused on business customers who will make up an increasingly larger share of the revenue.

Yuan on Monday touted new products aimed at enterprise customers, which increased 24% to 198,900 in the period ended April 30.

“These new product launches encapsulate our strategy to expand horizontally and vertically to ensure our customers are getting more out of the platform,” Yuan said in a conference call. He also touted customers for Zoom’s enterprise phone system, including Humana Inc., Avis Budget Group Inc. and Franklin Covey Co.

Zoom is making progress on diversifying its product portfolio, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts John Butler and Hoa Nguyen said in a note after the results.

Zoom hasn’t maintained the breakneck triple-digit growth it experienced during the pandemic as offices reopen and competition increases from Microsoft Corp.’s rival video communications platform. Fiscal first-quarter sales increased 12% to $1.07 billion, Zoom’s slowest year-over-year growth on record.

The stock has plummeted 51% this year as part of a broad decline among software makers.

Snap shares plunge by 30%

Snap shares plunged by 30% in extended trading on Monday after CEO Evan Spiegel warned in a note to employees that the company will miss its own targets for revenue and adjusted earnings in the current quarter.

In a CNBC report, the social media company said it will also slow down on hiring through the end of the year as it looks to manage expenses. Part of the letter was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“Today we filed an 8-K, sharing that the macro environment has deteriorated further and faster than we anticipated when we issued our quarterly guidance last month,” Spiegel wrote in the note. “As a result, while our revenue continues to grow year-over-year, it is growing more slowly than we expected at this time”, Spiegel said.

In April, Snap reported its first-quarter earnings that missed Wall Street expectations for sales and profit. At the time, the company said it expected between 20% and 25% YoY growth in revenue. It forecast adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of between $0 and $50 million.

The maker of the Snapchat app is facing rising inflation and interest rates, supply chain shortages, labour disruptions and platform policy changes like Apple’s iPhone privacy feature, according to Spiegel. There’s also a negative impact of the war in Ukraine.

As of Monday’s close, Snap shares were down over 50% for the year, compared to the 17% drop for the S&P 500. After hours, the stock dropped by 28% to $16.15. Should it fall more than 26.6% on Tuesday, it would be the worst day for the stock since the company went public in 2017.

YouTube is improving its misinformation fight

It’s a precarious time for tech CEOs whose businesses have to juggle misinformation, free speech, and demands from employees to take a stand on global and domestic issues. For YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, those responsibilities come on top of her efforts to grow the company with new competitors vying for screen time, the war in Ukraine, and an economic downturn that many predict will become a recession.

All of those issues, and many others, came up in a wide-ranging conversation Wojcicki had with Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday. As Shontell noted, YouTube would rank at number 121 on the Fortune 500 if it was a standalone company, with Wojcicki being only one of 45 female executives on the list.

With employees across all industries demanding that leadership speak out more strongly on social issues, it’s only natural that YouTube and Google employees would look to Wojcicki to chime in on the Supreme Court’s draft decision that would overturn Roe vs. Wade.

The misinformation surrounding the United States’ changing abortion laws is just one facet of the problem YouTube, Google, and their parent company Alphabet are trying to combat. Wojcicki pointed out that misinformation will always be around so long as there are incentives to create it, so the unit’s main task is to stay ahead of the bad-faith content creators without crossing the line into censorship.

We hope you enjoyed every bit of the updates in Global Roundup.

Have a great weekend!