Jack Dorsey's tweet sparks uproar: “You don't own ‘web3.’ The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It's ultimately a centralized entity”
Happy Friday Everyone 👋 — SIX things you need to know this week in 60 seconds. Ana Grabundzija / CryptoSlate : Reformed maxi Erik Vorhees joins the burning debate spurred by Jack Dorsey's Web3 rant Richard MacManus / Cybercultural : Top Internet Tech Stories of 2021 Joon Ian Wong / The Business of Business : Wondering why Web3 has Jack Dorsey fighting mad? Hint: it's all about Bitcoin. Sam Bourgi / Cointelegraph : Crypto Biz: What's up with Jack? Dec. 16-23 Michael Ippolito / Blockworks : Why All the Hate Directed at Web3? Babafemi Adebajo / Coinspeaker : Marc Andreessen Blocks Jack Dorsey as Web3 Spat Worsens Scott Bicheno / Telecoms.com : US tech masters of the universe squabble over the future of the internet the mesha tribe : 🤔 who owns Web3? — Welcome to the mesha tribe. A biweekly newsletter by Mesha … Tim Hakki / Decrypt : Elon Musk Says He's ‘Pro Doge’ Amid Ongoing Web3 Twitter Spat TechCircle : Dorsey, Musk, others lock horns over how decentralised web3 really is Doug Clinton / Uncomfortable Profit : Three Ideas on the Great Web3 Debate YouTube : FULL INTERVIEW: Elon Musk Sits Down With The Babylon Bee Shirin Ali / The Hill : Elon Musk blasts Mark Zuckerberg and the metaverse Suprita Anupam / Inc42 Media : Is Web 3.0 Centralised? Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey Spark A New Debate The Signal : Four day week next year Kevin Helms / Bitcoin News : Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk Raise Concerns Over Web3 as Skepticism About Ownership Grows Tweets: Jack⚡️ / @jack : The VCs are the problem *not the people Jon Reed / @jonerp : Elon Musk: metaverse isn't ‘compelling’ and Web3 ‘more marketing than reality’ https://www.theverge.com/... -> it's not every day that Elon Musk is the voice of reason, but he is today :) Mike Solana / @micsolana : ffs hundreds of millions of small businesses using fb tools. over half of amazon products come from small / medium-sized businesses. ride-sharing. home-sharing. an entire new media ecosystem. the list is endless. we don't need to nuke reality for the new thing to also be cool. https://twitter.com/... Ella Dawson-Wambsgans / @brosandprose : the worst person you know just made a great point https://twitter.com/... @shrinivassg : The first half of that tweet sounds eerily similar to what MLM friends used to me tell a few years ago while pitching one of those random things. https://twitter.com/... Ed Zitron / @edzitron : youtube patreon etsy very easy to find https://twitter.com/... Adam Singer / @adamsinger : FANG etc get 0 credit for quietly moving massive cohort from lower to upper middle class via RSUs/employment, has to be >100M people owning equity directly/via index; partner ecosystems, agencies, consultants, developers, etc. Find it weird crypto folk (& media) gloss over this.. https://twitter.com/... Void Angel / @egregirls : tell me you have no artist friends without telling me you have no artist friends https://twitter.com/... @gigamesh : VCs backing web3 are funding the ecosystems that turn users into owners so everyone can be a VC. Wealth inequality is the problem. https://twitter.com/... Lionel Laurent / @lionelralaurent : Looks like we are currently in the Marx-Bakunin feud phase of crypto https://twitter.com/... Tomiwa / @alephile : Almost no Nigerian enjoyed the VC tech boom (Google, Facebook IPOs). Random middle class Nigerians got thousands of dollars in ENS tokens because they valued ENS names and were early adopters. Web 3's economic incentives are different! https://twitter.com/... Parker / @pt : “We sold stuff on the promise of making people rich, for fiat money that we told those people was going to zero anyway, and now we have the money. You can't get rich this easy working a real job.” This is true, but is it good? https://twitter.com/... @cobie : I know hundreds of normal people financially free thanks to web3. Not VCs. Not founders. Just people that farmed airdrops and bought some tokens. Don't know anyone that is financially free thanks to web2 except founding teams and financiers. Jack⚡️ / @jack : @samkazemian ... I care only about decentralized, secure, private foundations without single points of failure. And I'm focused on that. Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : The repeated mantra of web3 is that it's egalitarian because earlier adopters get get shares (tokens) but in traditional startups only insiders do. The incentive of a Facebook or Google is to build useful products that lots of people use. For web3, it's getting tokens pre-FOMO. https://twitter.com/... Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : Selling shares is a means to an end, funding & motivating employees building world changing software. Web3 people are enamored with tokens as a faster way to mint shares and get to financial liquidity, independent of the software's impact. That's why VCs love it. Skip to the end Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : The misguided rhetoric of web3 is that the purpose of projects and companies is to enrich insiders. So web3 is better than Web 2.0 because the circle of insiders is expanded to include early adopters. This is a bleak and zero sum view of the world encouraged by VC culture. Sam Williams / @samecwilliams : The problem is not VCs or ‘the people’. It is the universal, inevitable corruption of vision that emerges in web2 companies. Companies exist simply and distinctly to make money for their shareholders. The solution is simple. Protocols: immutable, incorruptible services. https://twitter.com/... @cobie : I think ICO era was much fairer than current web3, which mirrors web2 incentive structures. Current founders' need for balancing reg risk w execution velocity means they raise privately from VCs & retail is late, similarly to web2. ICO era gave fairer terms to all but more risk. Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : I can't wait to see examples of web3 apps supporting millions of new jobs and businesses instead of trotting out examples of people getting in early on a token then getting rich when others FOMO in. Until then, we're celebrating zero sum transfers of income not new value created https://twitter.com/... Alex Danco / @alex_danco : Web3 kings of A16Z Bring us gifts of rare NFTs Holding tokens, quite outspoken Yet I can't see their tweets Tyler Winklevoss / @tyler : Oh the irony of the web3 debate raging on a web2 platform. Reminder: you don't own or control the tweets that you are tweeting. I support any technology that has a chance at changing this. @maxkeiser : Join the club! https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Marcus Hutchins / @malwaretechblog : Honestly loving the new Jack. The cryptocurrency community went from “giving control back to the people” to just worshipping a bunch of douchebro VCs whilst they get fleece everyone under the guise of “web3”. https://twitter.com/... Matthew Graham / @mattysino : so who wants to tell Jack the percentage of bitcoin supply owned by whales https://twitter.com/... Alex Svanevik / @asvanevik : Blessed to be on this community-owned website. https://twitter.com/... Tyler Winklevoss / @tyler : Brought to you by web3 https://twitter.com/... @zachweinberg : @cdixon Technically with most crypto startups, it's: first you sell tokens then speculators mark them up 👈 we are here then you buy a giant mansion in the Bahamas then people like me fight you then you search for use cases beyond speculation then some tiny subset of the ideas win Kara Swisher / @karaswisher : Welcome to the other BLOCK chain @jack — some of us have been living here a while already. (That said, we all use this feature you made, so there's that.) https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Tuur Demeester / @tuurdemeester : Venture Capital is crucial to any healthy society and one of the bedrocks of capitalism. However, modern, hype driven, growth obsessed, exit focused attention deficit Venture Capital is an economic sarcoma caused by chronic inflationism. https://twitter.com/... Preston Byrne / @prestonjbyrne : First they ignore you Then they laugh at you Then you quote Gandhi Then you get rekt by Jack Dorsey Nischal / @nischalshetty : I started my first startup by building on top of Twitter, FB and Insta APIs (they invited us to build on their APIs) When these platforms grew & wanted to monetise, each of these platforms REVOKED API access No VC or founder can do that to another developer on Web3 ✌️ #WEB3 https://twitter.com/... Benedict Evans / @benedictevans : Twitter arguments about what web3 & crypto might be, the ways the internet evolved in the past, and how to think about how new technologies evolve, are all very interesting... but sometimes feel like displacement from the scarcity of any actual fucking products to argue about. Aaron Levie / @levie : Oh the irony of listening to someone who's actually built a platform. https://twitter.com/... @cobie : But still not possible to ignore that regular people could become millionaires this year by doing nothing except using new products and receiving airdrops. No investment required, just using new things. Users were rewarded with ownership for being users. @cobie : Web3 gives us the tools to build a new way. The state attempts to keep the balance of power the same as it has always been. The SEC is a lobbying firm for VCs; fighting for privatising profits and maintaining the house edge against retail participants. @cobie : Web2 shovels advertisements down the throats of regular people in exchange for storing their photos & private messages. They take $100 per active user from ppl selling whatever and you get fuck all. They sell private fundraising to VCs for a decade before you can own any. Tim Griffin / @timgriffin77 : I dont have a huge following, but if I can impart some advice to first time founders ... don't let VC hype sway you from building what you believe in. Web3 may be hot right now, but there are so many industries where even basic software can have an outsized impact. Sam Kazemian / @samkazemian : Irony of @jack's web3=VC comment is projects feel coerced to sell to VCs out of SEC fear of releasing tokens publicly before decentralization. Then maxi messiah Saylor shouts for more regulation on all non-BTC tokens everyday while Jack piles the web3=VC hate from the back. Sad! Aaron Levie / @levie : How about the future of the web is just: * more interoperability * more open standards & new protocols * richer, more immersive apps * multiplayer everything * more APIs to leverage * more open source contribution * more monetization options * more voice, video, and media Matt Huang / @matthuang : Raise your hand if you like both Web2 and Web3 Edward Ongweso Jr / @bigblackjacobin : The capitalists are the problem (but especially the venture capitalists) https://twitter.com/... Doug Colkitt / @0xdoug : 1/ Been thinking a lot about the relationship between web2 and web3. Feels a lot like the first vs. second industrial revolutions. The second industrial revolution wasn't successful because it rejected the first. It was a force multiplier on stacked *on top* of the first https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Dorsey’s criticism had already run across several days of Web3 debate, turning venture ownership and limited-partner incentives into the dispute’s central fault line. The argument escalated from a critique of the model into a personal platform conflict when Marc Andreessen blocked Dorsey on Twitter.
Related coverage later portrays Dorsey as prioritizing Bitcoin after Twitter, giving the clash a clearer strategic context: his objection was not simply to crypto broadly, but to who controls a purportedly open system.
First-order effects
- Marc Andreessen’s block makes Dorsey’s critique an open conflict with a prominent Web3 investor, rather than a detached argument about decentralization.
- Web3 advocates and venture backers are immediately pressed to defend whether user ownership can coexist with VC and LP influence.
Second-order effects
- The dispute raises the reputational cost for Web3 projects that rely on venture funding while marketing decentralization, making governance and allocation claims a more visible test of credibility.
- Bitcoin’s position in Dorsey’s post-Twitter focus sharpens the contrast between his preferred model and VC-backed Web3, concentrating public debate on competing definitions of decentralization.
Third-order effects
- If ownership claims continue to collide with concentrated financing, crypto projects will be judged less by decentralization branding than by who controls capital, governance, and access.
- The episode is an early marker of a broader legitimacy divide: open-network narratives face continuing scrutiny when their funding structures centralize influence.
The trend: Crypto’s decentralization debate is shifting toward whether venture financing and LP incentives determine control before users ever do.