Gather 'round, children, it's time for the story of Azealia Banks and Jack Dorsey's magic beard hair amulet
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is the eternal bridesmaid of the “obnoxious tech billionaire” upper class; neither as watchably stoner-trainwreck awful as Elon Musk, or as “What is this thing you hoo-man lifeforms call love?” awkward as Mark Zuckerberg. Jack’s just kind of there, a gormless punching bag for people unconvinced by Twitter’s dedication to saying it’s going to change. (Not actual change, mind you; they just really like saying they will.)
Which is why it’s almost suspiciously interesting to read a story circulating at the intersection between tech news and music today, one that sounds like what you’d get if you made some poor, tortured AI read a thousand tweets about modern billionaire worship internet culture and then tried to make it spit out one of its own: Jack Dorsey supposedly once gave rapper Azealia Banks some of his beard hair, so that she could make a magical amulet to protect him from ISIS.
This comes to us from Spin, which did the Lord’s work in tracking down some alleged details of an anecdote that cropped up in a Vanity Fair profile of Dorsey this week, in which an unnamed source said he supposedly “had sent a rapper his beard shavings to make him an amulet that would protect him from evildoers.” For one thing, they identified the rapper in question, mostly because she tweeted a whole bunch about it back in 2016: Azealia Banks
Sadly, said tweets—in which Banks accused Dorsey of failing to come through on his part of a cross-promotion deal, and mused on whether she should use his face shavings to “steal his luck,” have now been deleted. (Stereogum still has copies, though, bless their hearts.) At the time, we admittedly all just sort of wrote the comments off as “Shit Azealia Banks says,” as we did that time she declared war on Australia, or whatever she did to piss off fellow music witch Lana Del Rey. But the Vanity Fair piece suggests that at least one of Dorsey’s colleagues believes it to be true, or at least true enough to leak it to reporter Nick Bilton (unless, of course, this is just Dorsey himself, trying to start some rumors in a desperate attempt at being interesting for once).