KEY POINTS

  • Ritholtz Wealth Management CEO Josh Brown said he sold all of his Twitter stock Tuesday
  • Brown criticized Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for his planned temporary move to Africa and his ban of political ads on the platform
  • Brown made a small profit on the sale of the stock

Ritholtz Wealth Management CEO Josh Brown told CNBC Tuesday that he sold all of his Twitter (TWTR) stock, criticizing the company’s CEO Jack Dorsey.

“You’ve got to separate a service you love from an investable company,” Brown said. He added that he has been “very wrong on Twitter” and called Dorsey a “half-CEO."

“I really don’t understand what’s going on with the governance of this company,” Brown said, lambasting Dorsey’s decision to ban political ads on the platform, and his choice to move temporarily to Africa in 2020.

Brown made a small profit on his sale of the stock, and used to express positive sentiments regarding the future of the company in media interviews.

The Twitter ad ban took effect on Nov. 22, after Facebook came under fire for not using fact checkers to monitor political ads on the platform. Dorsey justified the policy by saying that Twitter believes “political message reach should be earned, not bought.” Dorsey fears that Twitter could be used to push disinformation, and that this could influence elections.

Dorsey said in December that he would move to Africa for up to six months in 2020, which raised concerns with investors of how he would manage operations at Twitter.

“He should either be a CEO or should be a world traveler — but don’t think the two mesh together well," Michael Pachter, equity research analyst at Wedbush told CNBC earlier this month.

Twitter averaged 330 million monthly global users in the first quarter of 2019.

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