Jack Dorsey is Silicon Valley's Gwyneth Paltrow

s Twitter's head, he spends his days navigating issues around free speech for white supremacists, online abuse and spread of terrorist propaganda, all while facing a deluge of criticism from everyone

Young men are staggering around, hungry for days. They are throwing themselves into ice baths and cryotherapy pods. There are not enough beds at the silent vegan meditation centers to accommodate them. They need more near-infrared bulbs.

They are the followers of Jack Dorsey, Silicon Valley’s answer to the mega-influencer Gwyneth Paltrow. The lithe, 42-year-old tech founder has become a one-man Goop.

“In terms of influence, no one is at the scale of Jack,” said Geoffrey Woo, whose start-up, HVMN, sells fasting tools (like a liquid ketone supplement). He also heads up WeFast, an online support network for intermittent fasters.

It’s unlikely that Mr. Dorsey can embrace his wellness guru role as fully as Ms. Paltrow. He is already the chief executive of both the payments platform Square (valued at $30 billion) and Twitter (valued at $26 billion). As Twitter’s head, he spends his days navigating issues around free speech for white supremacists, online abuse and the spread of terrorist propaganda, all while facing a deluge of criticism from everyone (including the American president).

Still, Mr. Dorsey finds time for himself. For 10 days a year, he sits in silence at a meditation retreat. Before getting dressed each morning, he experiments with using his home infrared sauna and then an ice bath, sometimes cycling through both several times before he leaves home. He walks five miles to work. He eats one meal a day and has said that on the weekends when he fasts from Friday to Saturday, “time slows down.”

He talks about starting each morning with salt juice — water mixed with Himalayan salt and lemon. It is dispensed in Twitter offices around the world.

The tech world has two main personalities with cults: Mr. Dorsey and his foil, Elon Musk. Followers of Mr. Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, are drawn to his brash hyper-masculinity and angry tweets — his memes, rockets and flamethrowers.

Mr. Musk’s fans see him as a model of aggressive optimism. They swarm critics on Twitter and form Tesla Motor clubs. Some call themselves Musketeers, and there are quite a few Musk-themed tattoos posted to message boards.

He is the billionaire doing the things a billionaire in movies does. His hair has gotten thicker and his arms buffer. He dated a pop star and smoked pot on a podcast.

Mr. Dorsey, in comparison, seems to be having less fun.

He is very thin. He looks paler than usual. His beard is longer. The lines on his face have deepened, and he can seem to disappear in one of those high-end, overly long T-shirts. But to his followers, this monastic, pensive leader is a better direction for Silicon Valley. And while Mr. Musk’s acolytes seek to mirror an attitude, Mr. Dorsey’s have an 11-point lifestyle plan.

Just as an endorsement from Ms. Paltrow can make even the most spurious self-help objects instantly covetable, an endorsement from Mr. Dorsey can put products out of stock for weeks.

“We’re just really glad he’s spreading the message,” said Harpreet Rai, the chief executive of Oura Ring, which makes a sleep tracking device Mr. Dorsey endorsed.

Brian Richards, the founder of SaunaSpace, also owes something to the Twitter founder’s words. His company makes “Personal Near-Infrared Sauna” equipment. (A near-infrared sauna heats by pointing incandescent lights at you.) Its latest product is a Faraday tent, of sorts, that purports to block electromagnetic transmissions — creating “your very own EMF-free ancestral space.” Mr. Richards said his company had never been mentioned in the national press until Mr. Dorsey started talking about his personal SaunaSpace sauna on a fitness podcast, and now his products are back-ordered by a month.

“The demand’s been insane,” Mr. Richards said. “He legitimizes it. He’s a true believer. And now people are like, ‘Hey, if this guy’s doing it, maybe there’s something to it.’”

To Mr. Richards, who is based in Columbia, Mo., it makes sense that Mr. Dorsey’s tech followers would find these saunas and become one of his biggest consumer bases.

An EMF-blocking Faraday sauna is really the only escape these people have from electromagnetic stress,” Mr. Richards said. (Though a study of middle-aged and older Finnish men indicates that their health benefited from saunas, there have been no major studies conducted of “Faraday saunas.”)
 

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