Who Founded X Corp (formerly Twitter)?

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.