Khaberni - On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey published a simple message, "setting up my Twitter account".
That was the first post on the Twitter website, which is still known in popular culture as Twitter, even after its new owner Elon Musk renamed it to X (and the deal is still subject to legal dispute).
Then X became part of Musk's company, xAI, which in turn became part of SpaceX.
Since Musk's purchase of the tweeting site, Musk has significantly reduced the number of company employees and sparked widespread controversy by integrating the xAI chatbot Grok, which named itself "Mikehatler", and was widely used to create fake sexual videos, including clips of real women and children.
According to TechCrunch, while X remains popular among certain user demographics, including large segments of the technology industry, it faces competition from services like Bluesky and Threads owned by
Meta. One report indicates that Threads has recently surpassed X in the number of daily mobile users.
As for Dorsey's original tweet, it was later sold by the Twitter co-founder as a non-fungible token (NFT) for $2.9 million, but its value later plummeted, with the buyer unable to resell it.
According to a Fox News report, Twitter was launched in 2006 by founders Dorsey, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, and Noah Glass, who happened to all be friends.
The microblogging social network was born from a brainstorming session at Odeo, a podcast production company founded by Williams and Glass, according to a report published by the tech news site Live Wire.
The first tweet was published on March 21, 2006, by Dorsey and it read: "setting up my Twitter account," and interestingly, this test tweet garnered more than 121,600 retweets and likes.
Glass, who is said to have been a key software developer in the early stages of Twitter, was excluded from later company projects after Dorsey, Stone, and Williams facilitated the repurchase of the company's shares from the initial group of investors.
Upon its official launch, Dorsey held the position of CEO (from 2006 to 2008 and from 2015 to 2021), Williams served as the president and CEO of Twitter from 2009 to 2010, then became a member of the board of directors and an investor until 2019, while Stone became the co-founder who built Twitter's culture, according to USA Today.
Twitter was launched as a social networking site in 2007 after the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, where "more than 60,000 tweets were sent daily during the event," according to Live Wire.
Initially, Twitter allowed posting of tweets not exceeding 140 characters, and later, the maximum character limit was increased to 280 characters after a decade.
When did Twitter offer its shares for public subscription?
Twitter offered its shares for its initial public offering at $26 per share on November 7, 2013, with an opening price of $45.10, and a closing price of $44.90.
Along with its own business ventures, Twitter has made numerous acquisitions and mergers.
In its early days, most of Twitter's purchases were various domain names, and eventually, the company turned to purchasing larger brands in the social networking and technology sector with significant digital impact.
According to a report by business news site Crunchbase, Twitter acquired 66 brands during a short period of its transformation into a media giant until 2021, and this number increased after Elon Musk's era.
The most prominent acquisitions include the live video streaming app "Periscope" and the short video app "Vine" which ceased operations (life span: 2013 to 2017).
Elon Musk's era
According to a Business Insider report, Musk not only purchased Twitter, but reinvented it.
Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion in late 2022 after a prolonged legal battle that lasted for months.
From entering Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco carrying a sink to installing an artificial intelligence chatbot named Grok, the X platform, formerly known as Twitter, underwent numerous radical changes under Musk’s management.
At that time, Musk attempted to terminate the merger agreement, claiming that Twitter had not provided information about fake accounts and bots used for spam messaging.
Twitter filed a lawsuit against Musk to force him to complete the deal, then Musk filed a counterclaim, and eventually, Musk backed down before the case went to trial, and took control of Twitter, which he later renamed to X.
After the deal, Musk and X faced numerous lawsuits, they cut 80% of Twitter's employees, and made radical changes to the platform including its integration with the company "SpaceX".
