Twitter

In March 2006, a small team at the podcasting startup Odeo in San Francisco brainstormed ideas during a slow period. Jack Dorsey, then an NYU undergraduate, pitched a status-update service that let people share short messages via SMS. The first tweet went out on March 21: "just setting up my twttr." Seven months later, at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, the platform exploded. Usage jumped from 20,000 tweets a day to 60,000 overnight, and Twitter was on its way to reshaping how news, conversation, and culture happen in real time.

Twitter's early identity revolved around the 140-character limit, borrowed from SMS constraints. That rule forced brevity, and the platform became a global town square for everything from the Arab Spring protests to the 2014 FIFA World Cup. By 2012, 100 million users were sending 340 million tweets daily. The company went public in 2013 at $26 a share, and by 2019 it had 330 million monthly active users. Along the way, Twitter acquired and later shut down the short-video app Vine and the livestreaming service Periscope, both of which launched cultural moments but couldn't find sustainable revenue.

Everything changed in April 2022 when Elon Musk agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion. The deal was anything but smooth: Musk tried to back out, Twitter sued, and the courts forced the acquisition through. On October 27, Musk took the company private, merging it into X Corp. He immediately fired the CEO, CFO, and board, laid off roughly 80% of the workforce, and overhauled content moderation. In July 2023, he rebranded the platform as X, swapping the bird logo for a stark white X on black. The shift signaled ambitions to turn X into a "super app" like China's WeChat, adding long-form video, audio Spaces, and payments. But critics saw a sharp rise in hate speech, and the Center for Countering Digital Hate reported a 200% increase in anti-Semitic content within months of Musk's takeover. By early 2025, the platform still operates with over 500 million monthly active users, though ad revenue has dropped 45% and Fidelity values the company at roughly $12.5 billion, a 71% decline from the purchase price.[edit]