X Corp (formerly Twitter)
Social Media / Digital Advertising / TechnologyFounded 2006- Updated July 2025
Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya
Last reviewed: July 2025
CorpDigest
X Corp (formerly Twitter)
Company History
Founded 2006 in San Francisco, California
Last reviewed: 2025-07-15 · By Swet Parvadiya
Twitter began at a hackathon. Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams were working at Odeo, a podcasting startup that had been disrupted by Apple adding podcasting to iTunes. During a brainstorming session about what to build next, Dorsey sketched an SMS-based status update service. Glass named it Twitter. The first public tweet went out on March 21, 2006.
The South by Southwest Interactive conference in March 2007 was the growth catalyst that established Twitter as a significant platform rather than a niche experiment. The organizers placed two large flat-screen displays in conference hallways showing the Twitter stream. Attendees talked about panels on Twitter, found each other through the hashtag Glass had invented, and created a feedback loop of real-time social coordination that demonstrated the platform's core utility.
The founding team fractured early. Glass was pushed out before the product launched publicly. Dorsey was removed as CEO in 2008. Williams ran the company through its rapid growth phase, then stepped down in favor of Dick Costolo in 2010. Dorsey returned as CEO in 2015 after a period of drift and management instability that reflected genuine uncertainty about what Twitter was for and how to monetize it.
The IPO in November 2013 at $26 per share raised $1.8 billion. The stock rose 73 percent on the first day of trading. But Twitter consistently struggled to grow its user base past a ceiling that remained far below Facebook's — and advertising revenue, the primary revenue source, scales with users in ways that made the gap between Twitter and Facebook a permanent structural disadvantage. Musk's acquisition in 2022 closed a chapter that the company had never resolved: how to make the platform broadly profitable at the scale it actually commanded.
Jack Dorsey co-founded Twitter in 2006 and served as its first CEO before being removed by the board in 2008, a departure that would define much of his public narrative for the following decade. He returned to Twitter as interim CEO in July 2015 following Dick Costolo's resignation and became permanent CEO in October 2015, serving until November 2021 when he resigned and handed leadership to Parag Agrawal. During his second CEO tenure, Dorsey oversaw the expansion of the character limit to 280, the introduction of Twitter Fleets, and early experimentation with subscription products. He was notably a supporter of Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, despite later expressing reservations about the outcome. Dorsey founded Bluesky in 2019 as a decentralized social media protocol, which launched as a standalone app in 2023. He stepped down from Bluesky's board in 2024. He remains the CEO and chairman of Block, Inc., the payments and financial services company he co-founded in 2009.
Evan Williams served as CEO of Twitter from 2008 to 2010, overseeing the platform's critical early growth period and the development of its first advertising products. He had previously founded Blogger, which he sold to Google, giving him both financial resources and credibility when he co-founded Odeo and subsequently Twitter. After stepping down as Twitter CEO, Williams remained on the board for several years and founded Medium, a long-form writing and publishing platform that positioned itself as a thoughtful alternative to social media's brevity-driven discourse. Williams has been publicly reflective about Twitter's impact on public life, expressing in interviews a degree of ambivalence about the role the platform played in enabling toxic discourse despite its positive contributions to information access.
Biz Stone's role at Twitter was primarily in communications, brand building, and public relations rather than in engineering or business strategy, but his influence on the platform's early identity was significant. He published a memoir, 'Things a Little Bird Told Me,' in 2014, offering an insider account of Twitter's founding and early growth. Stone left Twitter after the company went public and co-founded several subsequent ventures including Jelly, a question-and-answer app, and Medium alongside Evan Williams. He later returned to Twitter in 2017 in an advisory capacity for a brief period. Stone has been consistent in crediting the Twitter founding as a genuinely collaborative effort rather than the product of any single genius, offering a more democratized account of the origin story than some other narratives suggest.
Noah Glass's marginalization from Twitter's official founding narrative is one of Silicon Valley's most notable examples of how corporate origin stories are curated to center certain individuals while minimizing others. Glass had co-founded Odeo with Evan Williams and was involved in the creation of Twitter's core concept and early development. His departure from the company in 2006, before Twitter had achieved any public recognition, meant he missed the financial windfall of the platform's growth and eventual IPO. His story gained wider public attention through journalist Nick Bilton's 2013 book 'Hatching Twitter,' which documented the founding conflicts and competing claims in detail. Glass subsequently worked on other technology projects and has maintained a relatively private profile compared to his more prominent co-founders.
Jack Dorsey pitched the concept for a real-time status broadcasting service during a brainstorming session at Odeo, the struggling podcast startup. The first prototype was built in two weeks, and the first tweet was sent by Dorsey on March 21, 2006: 'just setting up my twttr.' The 140-character limit was derived from the 160-character SMS standard.
Twitter's debut at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, generated the platform's first viral moment. Daily tweet volume tripled from 20,000 to 60,000 during the conference week as attendees used the service to coordinate meetups and share real-time conference observations. Twitter won the SXSW Web Award in the blog category.
Twitter's board of directors removed Jack Dorsey as CEO amid concerns about his management focus and operational effectiveness. Evan Williams, who had been serving as chairman, assumed the CEO role. Dorsey was given the title of chairman before eventually departing to found Square. The leadership change marked the beginning of a pattern of CEO instability that would persist for years.
Twitter launched its first commercial advertising product, Promoted Tweets, in April 2010 — four years after the platform's founding. Dick Costolo replaced Evan Williams as CEO. The Promoted Tweets format placed brand content directly in user timelines, establishing the advertising model that would generate the overwhelming majority of the company's revenue for the next decade.
Twitter went public on the New York Stock Exchange in November 2013, pricing its shares at $26 and achieving a market capitalization of approximately $24.5 billion. The stock surged 73 percent on its first trading day to close at $44.90. The IPO raised approximately $1.82 billion in primary proceeds. The public market debut would ultimately be followed by years of declining stock performance as user growth decelerated.
Jack Dorsey returned to Twitter as interim CEO in July 2015 following Dick Costolo's resignation under board pressure. Dorsey was confirmed as permanent CEO in October 2015 while simultaneously serving as CEO of Square. His second tenure included the expansion of the character limit from 140 to 280 characters in 2017 and early investments in live video through Periscope and sports streaming deals.
Twitter launched Twitter Blue, its first consumer subscription product, offering enhanced features for $2.99 to $4.99 per month. The product had limited initial uptake but established the subscription revenue concept that Musk would later dramatically expand. The company reported record total revenue of $5.08 billion for fiscal year 2021, with $4.51 billion from advertising, and reported its first significant profitable year.
After a months-long acquisition saga involving an initial offer, an attempted withdrawal, litigation threats from Twitter's board, and a court order compelling completion, Elon Musk closed his acquisition of Twitter for approximately $44 billion on October 27, 2022. Musk immediately fired the CEO, CFO, and other senior executives and began the process of dramatic cost reduction. The company was taken private.
Within days of the acquisition closing, Musk initiated mass layoffs that reduced Twitter's workforce from approximately 7,900 full-time employees to roughly 1,500 to 2,000. Layoffs were communicated via mass email with immediate system access revocation. The speed and scale of the cuts eliminated expertise in content moderation, engineering, legal compliance, and advertiser support and triggered regulatory investigations in multiple jurisdictions.
Elon Musk announced the rebranding of Twitter to X in July 2023, replacing the iconic blue bird logo with a stylized white 'X' on a black background. The rebranding extended to the platform's URL, which migrated from twitter.com to x.com, retiring one of the most recognized brand identities in digital media history. The rebrand represented Musk's explicit vision of transforming the platform into an everything app.
Linda Yaccarino, former Chairman of Advertising and Partnerships at NBCUniversal, was hired as X Corp's CEO in June 2023. Yaccarino was tasked with rebuilding advertiser relationships damaged by the post-acquisition chaos. In the same year, X launched a creator revenue-sharing program distributing advertising revenue to verified creators, and introduced X Premium tiers ranging from $8 to $16 per month.
X Corp advanced its payments ambitions through the launch of X Money, allowing users to link bank accounts and transact within the platform. The company deepened its integration with Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI, deploying the Grok AI assistant to X Premium subscribers and pursuing exclusive data licensing arrangements that give xAI access to X's real-time post firehose for AI model training.
Twitter acquired Periscope, a live video streaming startup founded by Kayvon Beykpour and Joe Bernstein, in January 2015 for approximately $100 million before the app had even publicly launched. The acquisition was driven by Twitter's recognition that live video was becoming a critical content format for its real-time information positioning, and Periscope's technology provided a native live streaming capability that Twitter could integrate directly into its platform. The timing also reflected competitive pressure from Meerkat, a rival live streaming app that had generated significant buzz at South by Southwest 2015.
Twitter acquired MoPub, a mobile advertising exchange founded in 2010, for approximately $350 million in 2013. MoPub's technology enabled real-time bidding for mobile advertising inventory across third-party apps, giving Twitter a programmatic advertising infrastructure that could extend its commercial relationships beyond the Twitter platform itself. The acquisition represented Twitter's ambition to compete in the broader mobile advertising ecosystem rather than operating exclusively within its own product environment.
Twitter acquired Vine, a six-second looping video creation and sharing app, in October 2012 for approximately $30 million, two months before the app launched publicly. The acquisition was driven by the emerging importance of video content in social media and Twitter's desire to own a native video creation format that would complement its text-based platform. Vine's short-form, loop-based video format was distinctly differentiated from YouTube's longer content and aligned with Twitter's preference for brevity.
Twitter acquired Scroll, a subscription service that offered readers an ad-free news reading experience while sharing subscription revenue with publisher partners, in 2021 for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition was intended to support Twitter's emerging subscription product strategy, providing technology and publisher relationships that could be integrated into Twitter Blue to offer subscribers an enhanced news reading experience as part of the premium tier.
Twitter began as an internal side project at Odeo, a podcasting startup based in South Park, San Francisco, in early 2006 when the company's flagship podcast directory was rendered obsolete by Apple's June 2005 integration of podcasts into iTunes. Odeo engineer Jack Dorsey pitched a status-update service to product manager Noah Glass and co-founder Biz Stone during an Odeo hackathon, sketching the original concept on a notepad as a way for friends to broadcast what they were doing in real time via SMS. Noah Glass coined the name twttr after browsing a dictionary for words evoking short bursts of inconsequential information, and the missing vowels mimicked the prevailing five-character SMS shortcode style of services like Flickr. The first public tweet was posted by Jack Dorsey at 12:50 p.m. Pacific time on March 21, 2006, reading just setting up my twttr. Evan Williams, the Blogger founder who had sold his company to Google in 2003 and had funded Odeo, provided the capital to spin Twitter out of Odeo into an independent entity called Obvious Corporation in October 2006. The four co-founders, Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, were granted founding equity, although Glass was forced out within months and his role in naming and championing the product remained quietly contested for more than a decade.
Twitter's breakout cultural moment came at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, in March 2007, eleven months after the public launch. The Twitter team installed two sixty-inch plasma screens in the convention center hallways that displayed a live feed of tweets from attendees, creating a real-time back-channel for the conference and giving thousands of influential technologists their first hands-on exposure to the service. Daily tweet volume tripled during the conference, rising from roughly twenty thousand tweets a day to sixty thousand within the week, and Twitter swept the festival's web awards in the blog category. The 2007 South by Southwest win is widely cited by industry historians as the inflection point that converted Twitter from a hobby project among a few hundred San Francisco engineers into a national phenomenon, generating coverage in mainstream outlets including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Wired magazine within weeks of the festival. By the end of 2007, Twitter had raised a five million dollar Series A led by Union Square Ventures, hired its first dozen employees beyond the co-founders, and begun the API and developer ecosystem expansion that would carry the service through the political and celebrity adoption waves of 2008 and 2009.
Twitter, Inc. completed its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange on November 7, 2013, pricing seventy million shares at twenty-six dollars each to raise approximately 1.82 billion dollars and giving the company an opening market capitalization of roughly fourteen billion dollars. The shares opened the next morning at forty-five dollars and fifty cents, a seventy-three percent first-day pop, briefly valuing the company at more than twenty-four billion dollars and earning the IPO the title of the largest US technology debut since Facebook's flotation in May 2012. Twitter chose the NYSE over Nasdaq, the traditional venue for technology issues, in part because of operational problems during the Facebook IPO that had embarrassed Nasdaq the previous year. Goldman Sachs led the underwriting syndicate alongside Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, and the company traded under the ticker symbol TWTR. Twitter had filed confidentially under the JOBS Act in July 2013, disclosed its S-1 publicly on October 3, 2013, and conducted a compressed five-week roadshow before pricing. At the IPO Twitter reported 218 million monthly active users and trailing nine-month revenue of 422 million dollars, with losses of 134 million dollars. The TWTR ticker would trade on the NYSE for nine years until the Musk acquisition forced delisting on October 28, 2022.
Elon Musk closed his acquisition of Twitter on October 27, 2022, paying fifty-four dollars and twenty cents per share in cash for a total enterprise value of approximately forty-four billion dollars, the largest leveraged buyout in technology history. Musk had first disclosed a 9.2 percent passive stake in Twitter on April 4, 2022, briefly accepted a board seat, then walked away from the board and offered to buy the entire company at fifty-four dollars and twenty cents per share on April 14, a price chosen as a reference to cannabis culture. The Twitter board initially adopted a poison pill but accepted the offer on April 25 after Musk lined up financing including thirteen billion dollars of debt from Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, MUFG, Mizuho, Société Générale, BNP Paribas and a syndicate of additional lenders. Musk attempted to terminate the agreement in July 2022, citing concerns about spam-bot disclosures, and Twitter sued in the Delaware Court of Chancery. Facing a near-certain loss in an expedited October trial, Musk reversed course on October 4, 2022, and agreed to close at the original price. He took the company private the same day, fired chief executive Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal, legal head Vijaya Gadde and general counsel Sean Edgett by walking them out of the headquarters, and renamed the entity X Corp shortly thereafter.
Twitter was renamed X on July 23 and 24, 2023, when Elon Musk replaced the blue bird logo on the platform with a stylized white X on a black background, repainted the San Francisco headquarters sign with an X, and pointed the twitter.com URL at x.com. The rebrand reflected Musk's long-standing ambition to build an everything app modeled on China's WeChat, a vision he had nurtured since founding X.com as an online bank in 1999 before that entity merged with Confinity to become PayPal. The X.com domain had been dormant for two decades after eBay acquired PayPal in 2002, and Musk repurchased it personally in 2017 for sentimental reasons. Beyond the visual rebrand, the X identity signaled a strategic shift away from the public conversation utility Twitter had become and toward a multi-product platform incorporating long-form video, audio Spaces, peer-to-peer payments, creator subscriptions, and the integration of the xAI Grok chatbot. The handle changes triggered immediate operational headaches because the single-letter X handle had been held by photographer Gene X. Hwang since 2007 and had to be reclaimed without compensation, the iOS and Android app stores took weeks to allow a single-character app name, and the City of San Francisco issued a building-code violation when the rooftop X sign was installed without a permit on the Market Street headquarters.