Can Twitter CEO Dick Costolo make his ‘Mark’?

Like all companies new to public markets, Twitter is having its growing pains for all to see.

Right now, Wall Street is trying to decide if CEO Dick Costolo, at 51 years old, has what it takes to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, age 30.

Facebook, from its disastrous IPO to well past its one-year anniversary of going public, drove investors mad, but eventually Zuckerberg’s strategy took hold, and its stock has since rewarded shareholders handsomely.

Twitter shareholders — who have been suffering miserably for the last year after shares climbed to $69 in early 2014 — may be seeing the same sort of turnaround, with shares closing up 16.4 percent Friday, at $48.01. This quarter’s earnings may hold the clues.

Critics have been calling for Costolo’s head for months now as the stock has languished.

Peter Thiel of PayPal fame has even questioned Costolo’s leadership in interviews, once saying, “It’s a horribly managed company — probably a lot of pot-smoking going on there.”

Twitter’s results, announced Thursday, while beating revenue and earnings-per-share estimates, were discounted because the number of monthly active users came in light.

But under a new pact with Google, the search engine’s algorithms will feature Twitter’s tweets.

Costolo worked at Google — and was very well thought of after it acquired FeedBurner, one of his companies — before striking out to help run Twitter as COO in 2009.

The Street believes the Google partnership is a giant — and potentially transformational — step toward kicking Twitter’s growth into high gear, increasing users and hence ad revenues.

Whether he can follow in Zuckerberg’s footsteps has yet to be seen, but Costolo, whose first career was as a stand-up comic, does have a touch of self-deprecating humor that the rest of Silicon Valley sorely lacks. In response to Thiel, Costolo tweeted (of course) a response: “Working my way through a giant bag of Doritos…”