Twitter announced on Monday (25) that it had accepted a US$44 billion (R$ 214 billion) offer made by billionaire Elon Musk to buy the social network.
The network was created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams. The first tweet was posted by Dorsey in March of that year.
Initially, the service would be called “twttr”—the domain “twitter” was already in use, and would only be purchased later.
Twitter’s popularity would really start to grow in 2007, during the SXSW (South by Southwest) festival, when there was a peak of 60,000 tweets per day.
Interaction grew dramatically: there were 400,000 tweets per quarter in 2007; in February 2010, Twitter users were sending 50 million posts a day, according to their own measurements.
In a short time, the political and commercial potential of the network became clear. In the 2008 US election, Democrat Barack Obama surpassed his competitor, John McCain, on social media, accumulating more than 20 times more followers on Twitter. This performance made it almost mandatory for politicians to include social media presence as part of their campaign strategy.
The platform was also consolidating itself as an important news dissemination tool. In 2009, a tweet from a female passenger revealed the successful landing of a plane in the Hudson River in New York. The same happened after the earthquake in Haiti in 2010.
In 2013, Twitter announced its IPO (initial public offering) and in November of that year it reached a market value of US$31 billion.
Dorsey returned as CEO in 2015, remaining with the company until November 2021, when he was replaced by Parag Agrawal. During this period, the character limit for a tweet was increased from the famous 140 to 280 characters in 2017.
In January 2021, former President Donald Trump’s account was deleted for risking incitement to violence. Also last year, Twitter introduced Spaces, an option where accounts with more followers could host real-time audio conversations.
Currently, the network has about 217 million users.
See below the chronology with the main moments in the history of Twitter.
I have over 8 years of experience in the news industry. I have worked for various news websites and have also written for a few news agencies. I mostly cover healthcare news, but I am also interested in other topics such as politics, business, and entertainment. In my free time, I enjoy writing fiction and spending time with my family and friends.
