About X
Twitter was founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, and Noah Glass, building a social media platform centered on short, public text-based posts, originally limited to 140 characters and later expanded, that let users share brief updates, opinions, and links publicly, with other users able to "follow" accounts whose posts they wanted to see and "retweet" or share posts to their own followers, a format that became particularly influential for real-time public conversation around breaking news, politics, and cultural events, with Twitter often serving as a primary platform where journalists, public figures, and engaged members of the public conducted real-time public discourse, despite the platform's user base and revenue generally remaining considerably smaller than dominant social platforms like Facebook or Instagram.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, completed an acquisition of Twitter in October 2022 for approximately $44 billion, following a lengthy and highly public negotiation and legal dispute process in which Musk had initially attempted to withdraw from his original acquisition agreement before ultimately completing the deal, and subsequently implemented very significant changes to the platform, including substantial staff reductions, changes to content moderation policies, the introduction of a paid verification subscription system replacing the platform's previous free verification badge system, and a rebranding of the company and platform from Twitter to X in 2023, part of Musk's stated broader ambition to transform the platform into an "everything app" incorporating payments and other functionality beyond its original social media and public conversation focus. Musk has since integrated X closely with xAI, his separately founded AI company developing the Grok family of AI models, including a 2025 transaction that combined X and xAI into a single combined corporate entity, reflecting Musk's strategic vision of integrating X's real-time public data and large user base with xAI's AI model development and product ambitions. The platform has navigated substantial controversy and advertiser pullback related to content moderation policy changes and various controversial statements and positions taken by Musk himself, alongside reported declining usage in some markets, while Musk has continued pursuing an ambitious vision of combining social media, AI, and payments functionality within a single unified platform.
