Can Jack Dorsey be Steve Jobs?

This afternoon, Kara Swisher and Kurt Wagner broke the news on Re/code that Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and current interim C.E.O., would soon be elevated to become its new permanent C.E.O. The news is equal parts surprising (Dorsey, who refused the job earlier this year, concurrently runs his mobile-payments company, Square), bizarre (the Twitter search committee recently stipulated that its C.E.O. couldn’t have a side gig), and also entirely, almost boringly expected. Twitter, after all, has been getting socked around in the public markets for months. Absent gimmicks, such as an easing of its patented 140-character count, it needed to appoint a savior at the helm. Dorsey seemed like the logical and perhaps only real choice.

Mythology often plays a crucial component in Silicon Valley lore, and its hard to discuss any C.E.O.’s return to a company they founded without invoking Steve Jobs’s reconciliation at Apple. Dorsey and Jobs have other similarities too: throughout his career, Dorsey has masterfully cultivated the media, used his personal appearance (the beard!) to perfect his brand image, and woven his company within a narrative of larger global change. But perhaps their greatest similarity is a profound, almost preternatural understanding of the importance of the origin story. According to lore, Jobs left Reed College, travelled the world, had a fling with Joan Baez, and then funneled his life experiences and insights into helping create the world’s most transformative, personalized computing company. Likewise, as Nick Bilton has reported, Dorsey showed up to a San Francisco park with a couple buddies, burritos in hand, and scaled a slide, from which he explained his vision of a short-burst, status-sharing Internet messaging service built on an almost child-like desire for connectivity.

“That playground right up there is where I first brought up the idea,” Dorsey told CNBC many years later.

In reality, things are never quite that simple when you’re building multi-billion-dollar businesses. But origin tales—whether its the Palo Alto garage or Harvard dorm room—neatly articulate how a life plays into a company and vice versa. And this can be valuable for a company, particularly a tech company. Twitter’s board and investors certainly hope that Dorsey’s umbilical connection to his company will pay off.

But the record of returning C.E.O.s is more scattered. Sure, Jobs turned Apple into the most valuable company in the world; and Larry Page’s return helped transform Google from a mature, money-minting search and ad company to a mature, money-minting search and ad and innovation company. On the other hand, Yahoo founder Jerry Yang returned to the company of his founding for a short, ignominious stint that included rejecting Microsoft’s $45 billion acquisition offer. Upon his return, Michael Dell never seemed quite able to pivot his PC company into a more successful sector.

On some level, the greatest achievement of Jobs’s career was that he made the notion of turning around a tech company seem possible in the first place. Few companies have ever been able to reverse their fortunes, and none have pulled off the trick as deftly as Apple did. Marissa Mayer, who was hired to perform a similar feat at Yahoo, is living proof that even the most competent executives have difficulty steering their companies to play catch-up in fast-moving markets. (Today, Yahoo has a market cap of $27 billion, just more than half of the Microsoft deal.)

It’s possible that Twitter will experience the same sort of fate. Despite coming into the world as a piping-hot social-media company, it has lost ground to services like Snapchat and WhatsApp. Meanwhile, Facebook’s pursuit of global domination seems unending. Among the many things technology has disrupted is the life cycle of a company itself. Hot tech companies soar in the private markets and often debut at monster valuations only, years later, to look like stable, if less glamorous, versions of their younger selves. Twitter may not be the hot company it was in 2013, but it is still a $18-billion market cap behemoth. That’s not bad for middle age.

In his younger days, Dorsey reportedly irked colleagues for leaving early to attend yoga or caring a wee bit too much about his personal image. Now, he appears as a seasoned C.E.O. preparing to lead his second company to an I.P.O. The beard he briefly donned, a symbol of age or sagacity or something else, quickly became a meme-like metaphor for his own executive growth. For Twitter, a company with a history of activist board members and a rotating executive carousel, that wouldn’t be a bad message to impart. Dorsey, in the end, doesn’t need to have a Jobs-like effect on Twitter. He just needs to be the C.E.O. he has become.