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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Photo by Bloomberg

In 2016, as Twitter’s market capitalization shriveled to around $10 billion from a high of $35 billion, Silicon Valley investor Chamath Palihapitiya decided to make a bid for control of the onetime tech pioneer. 

He and a partner wanted to invest $1 billion in the company in a deal that would make him executive chairman and Adam Bain, then Twitter’s chief operating officer, CEO, Palihapitiya says. The former Facebook executive met with the Twitter management team—although CEO Jack Dorsey didn’t show up—and laid out a vision for how Twitter could take a page from Facebook’s growth playbook, which Palihapitiya, in a prior role, had helped build. The Twitter team never followed up, and Palihapitiya lost interest.

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