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
X Corp (formerly Twitter) is a Social Media / Digital Advertising / Technology company with $2.5B in 2023 revenue and 2K employees worldwide. X Corp represents a singular experiment in American business: the deliberate and radical transformation of a cultural institution by a single controlling owner operating without the constraints of public company governance, quarterly earnings calls, or traditional institutional investor oversight. The company that existed as Twitter from 2006 to 2022 was imperfect but familiar — a chronically unprofitable but culturally indispensable social media platform whose advertising revenue model, editorial philosophy, and organizational culture were comprehensible within the established framework of Silicon Valley technology companies. The company that exists as X in 2025 is something different: a privately held platform with a dramatically reduced workforce, a more permissive content environment, an ambitious multi-revenue-stream model, and an owner whose personal behavior and public statements are inseparable from the platform's brand identity in ways that have no clear precedent in the history of American technology. The platform's 250 to 300 million daily active users represent a base that, while smaller than Meta's or TikTok's, is uniquely concentrated among high-influence demographics: journalists, politicians, executives, academics, and engaged citizens who use X as their primary interface with public discourse. This demographic concentration is the foundation of X's cultural relevance and its advertising value proposition. Whether the company can translate that relevance into sustainable commercial success — and whether its owner's management style can be reconciled with the institutional advertiser relationships that make social media business models viable — are the central questions that will define X Corp's legacy.
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.