Twitter employees can work from home forever, CEO Jack Dorsey says

After being forced to backtrack on plans to travel to Africa this year, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s work-from-anywhere philosophy is being vindicated by the coronavirus.

The social network’s CEO on Tuesday emailed his staff to say that employees whose jobs permit it will be allowed to work remotely forever — even after the coronavirus pandemic is over.

Dorsey added that Twitter would be unlikely to reopen its offices before September, according to BuzzFeed News, and said business travel would be canceled until that time as well.

Twitter’s in-person events are similarly canceled through 2020, and the company will “reassess its plan for 2021 later this year.”

“We’ve been very thoughtful in how we’ve approached this from the time we were one of the first companies to move to a work from home model,” Twitter told BuzzFeed News in a statement.

Dorsey in February revealed his ambitions for Twitter to have a more global workforce that will allow anyone to work from anywhere after he came under fire for saying in December that he planned to move to Africa for as much as six months this year. The stock tanked, and then reports emerged that activist hedge fund Elliott Management had bought a stake and was questioning whether Dorsey was the right man for the job.

Dorsey backtracked from his travel plans at the start of March — a week before coming to a truce with Elliott. At the time, he cited the spread of the coronavirus as the reason he was bowing out.

“I had been working on my plans where I’d work decentralized, as my team and I do when we travel, but in light of COVID-19 and everything else going on I need to reevaluate,” Dorsey said on Twitter’s Investor Relations account.

Shares of Twitter were up 0.6 percent Tuesday afternoon, at $29.87.