Recode asks: “Did Jack Dorsey send beard shavings to rapper Azealia Banks to promote Square Cash?” Well—did he? For the GIF-filled answer, click here.

This morning, Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey announced he’s laying off 336 employees, but would do so “with the utmost respect for each and every person.” Also this morning, Twitter engineer Bart Teeuwisse woke up, checked his phone, and learned that he’d been laid off through iOS notifications.

Twitter plans to lay off eight percent of its workforce, the bearded Machiavellian at its helm announced in a memo to the company today. Those 336 workers who will be going home without their jobs can at least take comfort in the fact that when Jack Dorsey cut them loose, Jack didn’t beat around the bush. Jack gave it to them straight, baby.

In a past age, the American robber baron class would combat bad publicity by building a library or calling in the Pinkertons. Today, Silicon Valley’s captains of industry convince people they’re not a horror-show money vampires simply by growing cool beards.

Former comedian Dick Costolo will “step down” (Ha Ha) from his CEO perch at Twitter, a company that only recently started making money and hasn’t been making enough of it. His replacement is Jack Dorsey, former poet, and notorious monster and screwer of friends.

It's time for Sun Valley, Allen & Co.'s annual Idaho gathering of the ultramonied ruling class. Unlike Davos or Bohemian Grove, this one is something of a family affair. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan are there. So are all manner of other mogul and spouse pairs.

Before it was "Twitter" or even "twttr," America's favorite microblogging service had two other, absolutely terrible names. Crackhead names.

Twitter has completed its 300 millionth user registration, meaning its census nearly matches that of the entire United States. It's economic output, not so much.

He's been expunged from Twitter's official history, but Noah Glass is widely acknowledged as the microblogging system's most passionate advocate from when he named and helped create Twitter until the day he was fired. Business Insider tells his story.

Chris Lehmann traded place with his wife Ana Marie Cox; Molly McAleer traded places with Rahm Emanuel; and Alex Payne's messages to Twitter.com traded places with Twitter.com's messages to Alex Payne. The Twitterati got the old switcheroo.

Layoffs at the fast-shrinking San Francisco Chronicle have freed up a lot of office space in the newspaper's headquarters. So naturally the Chronicle is now subleasing to a guy who severely undercut its business model in the first place. Spooky.

Sarah Silverman compared her feelings to quicksand; Rob Thomas compared President Obama to President Bush; and a newspaper staffer likened the story process to oral sex. The Twitterati turned up the contrast.

Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter and the man you can blame for destroying your productivity at work, turns 33 today. Fashion designer Calvin Klein is turning 67. Meg Ryan is 48. Today show news anchor Ann Curry is turning 53. Former GE CEO Jack Welch is 74. Ted Turner is turning 71. Jodie Foster is 47. Restaurant-less chef Rocco DiSpirito turns 43. Model Daria Werbowy is 26. Actress Allison Janney is 50. WNYC president Laura Walker is 52. TV legend Dick Cavett turns 73. Jerry Sheindlin, the former People's Court judge and husband of Judge Judy, is turning 76. Former football player and sportscaster Ahmad Rashad is 60. And Larry King is 76 today, or just 24 years away from celebrating his centennial.

It's not the freak occurrence it might seem, Twitter's co-founder submitting to psychoanalysis before a New York crowd. No, this sort of Jungian free-associating is what microblogging was expressly designed to do.

It's easy to get the idea Jack Dorsey is acting out a revenge fantasy. Fired one year ago as CEO of his brainchild Twitter, Dorsey now says he's planning a startup with "similar ideas" — right in Twitter's back yard.

The gang of webheads sent by the State Department to Iraq is doing what webheads do: blogging, Twittering, and posting photos in real time. This must be giving their government minders fits.

Call it the final wave of the American invasion: A passel of tech executives from Google, YouTube, Twitter, and others, squired by a Wired feature writer, are touring Iraq.

Twitter CEO Ev Williams and his wife, Sara Morishige, are building a house. What took so long? San Francisco's most disorganized Internet boss dude has been rich since 2003, after he sold Blogger to Google.

People who use Twitter, a service which posts short updates to the Web and cell phones, love nothing more than to Twitter about themselves, and the medium they've so enthusiastically adopted. If you go by the Twitterers' collective reporting, every event, from an earthquake in Los Angeles to terrorist bombings in Mumbai, is more notable for the fact that people are writing about it on Twitter than for its inherent interest as news. The dominant narrative of Twitter is the rise of Twitter, the latest force to displace the mainstream media and roil the world's information economy. Too bad the real story of the company is one of top-to-bottom incompetence.

The Wall Street Journal is running a strange article about Twitter. Everything about it strikes me as bizarre, right down to the picture, which shows Jack Dorsey, the cofounder recently ousted as the company's CEO. Indeed, the article is more telling in what it doesn't cover than what it does.For example, it doesn't even allude to the company's office drama; cofounder Biz Stone subs in as spokesman for new CEO Ev Williams. It also skips over Twitter's latest privacy violation, which even affected the author of the piece. But it does, in a roundabout way, get at the heart of Twitter's problem: The tool for posting short text updates can be useful for businesses — just not Twitter itself. Cofounder Biz Stone suggests the company may find a way to charge business customers for "premium services." A great idea. If only it had tried it a year ago, before the market crisis made such a move look desperate, rather than a bold experiment. (Photo by Getty Images)