This article is about the social network. For the former parent company, see Twitter, Inc.
| Logo used since July 2023[a] | |
| X homepage visited while logged out in June 2025 | |
| Formerly | Twttr (early 2006)[3]Twitter (2006–2023) |
|---|---|
| Type of site | Social networking service |
| Available in | Multilingual |
| Founded | March 21, 2006; 19 years ago, in San Francisco, California, U.S. |
| Headquarters | Bastrop, Texas, United States |
| Area served | Worldwide, except blocking countries |
| Owner | Odeo (March–October 2006)Obvious Corporation (2006–2007)Twitter, Inc. (2007–2023)X Corp. (2023–present) |
| Founder(s) | Jack DorseyNoah GlassBiz StoneEvan Williams |
| Chairman | Elon Musk |
| CEO | Linda Yaccarino |
| URL | x.com |
| Registration | Required[b] |
| Launched | July 15, 2006; 18 years ago |
| Current status | Active |
| Native client(s) on | WebAndroidiOSiPadOSAmazon Fire Tablet |
| Content license | Proprietary[4] |
| Written in | ScalaJavaRubyJavaScriptPython |
| [5] | |
Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world’s largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites.[6][7] Users can share short text messages, images, and videos in short posts commonly known as “tweets” (officially “posts”) and like other users’ content.[8] The platform also includes direct messaging, video and audio calling, bookmarks, lists, communities, a chatbot (Grok), job search,[9] and Spaces, a social audio feature. Users can vote on context added by approved users using the Community Notes feature.
Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, and was launched in July of that year. Twitter grew quickly; by 2012 more than 100 million users produced 340 million daily tweets.[10] Twitter, Inc., was based in San Francisco, California, and had more than 25 offices around the world.[11] A signature characteristic of the service initially was that posts were required to be brief. Posts were initially limited to 140 characters, which was changed to 280 characters in 2017. The limitation was removed for subscribed accounts in 2023.[12] 10% of users produce over 80% of tweets.[13][14] In 2020, it was estimated that approximately 48 million accounts (15% of all accounts) were run by internet bots rather than humans.[15]
The service is owned by the American company X Corp., which was established to succeed the prior owner Twitter, Inc. in March 2023 following the October 2022 acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk for US$44 billion. Musk stated that his goal with the acquisition was to promote free speech on the platform. Since his acquisition, the platform has been criticized for enabling the increased spread of disinformation[16][17][18] and hate speech.[19][20][21] Linda Yaccarino succeeded Musk as CEO on June 5, 2023, with Musk remaining as the chairman and the chief technology officer.[22][23][24] In July 2023, Musk announced that Twitter would be rebranded to “X” and the bird logo would be retired,[25][26] a process which was completed by May 2024. Since Musk’s takeover, data from app-tracking firms has shown that global usage of Twitter has declined by approximately 15%, compared to a decline of 5–10% in some other social media sites.[27][28][29] The platform has disputed that usage has dropped at all, with Musk claiming without evidence that membership had grown to 600 million users as of a May 2024 tweet.[30]
In March 2025, X Corp. was acquired by xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company. The deal, an all-stock transaction, valued X at $33 billion, with a full valuation of $45 billion when factoring in $12 billion in debt. Meanwhile, xAI itself was valued at $80 billion.[31][32]
History
Main article: History of Twitter
For a chronological guide, see Timeline of Twitter.
2006–2021
Jack Dorsey claims to have introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate to a small group in 2006.[33] The original project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that Williams later ascribed to Noah Glass,[34] inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes. The decision was also partly due to the fact that the domain twitter.com was already in use, and it was six months after the launch of twttr that the crew purchased the domain and changed the name of the service to Twitter.[35] Work on the project started in February 2006.[36]
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