Before X

X used to be Twitter. This page is the part that happened before Elon Musk walked into the San Francisco office with a sink.

Odeo, twttr, 140 characters

The thing started as a side project inside Odeo, a podcasting company Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass had founded in 2004. Jack Dorsey proposed an SMS status tool. Glass suggested the name Twttr. On 21 March 2006 Dorsey sent the first message: just setting up my twttr. The public product launched 15 July 2006. In October the founders folded Odeo into Obvious Corporation; Twitter spun out as its own company in April 2007. Williams later fired Glass. Dorsey was the first CEO.

The constraint that made it a form — 140 characters, later 280 — was the SMS packet. The bird was the mark. The timeline was the product.

The Fail Whale years

Twitter became infrastructure before it became a reliable company. Outages were so common they got a mascot, Yiying Lu's Fail Whale — a whale hoisted by birds. SXSW 2007 was the breakout. By 2009 it was a news wire: Hudson River landing, Iranian protests, later the Arab Spring. Governments and journalists treated the firehose as a public square even while the company was still figuring out how to stay up.

Dick Costolo took over as CEO in 2010. Dorsey returned in 2015. The product added photos, then video, then Spaces. Verification became a status mark. The open API of the early years, which had made Twitter a platform, was steadily fenced.

IPO, politics, the civic years

Twitter went public on 7 November 2013 and raised about $1.8 billion. It was never as large as Facebook. It was louder per user. Donald Trump's account, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the 2016 and 2020 U.S. elections, COVID — the site became a place where institutions were forced to talk in public, and a place where harassment scaled. The company built a trust-and-safety stack, then argued with itself about it. Advertisers were the revenue. The timeline was the fight.

Jack Dorsey spent the later years trying to make Twitter both a protocol and a public company. He did not finish.

The sale

In April 2022 Musk disclosed a 9.2 percent stake, then agreed to buy the company for $44 billion. He tried to get out of the deal. Delaware would have forced it. He closed on 27 October 2022, fired senior management, and took the company private. In July 2023 the bird came down and the wordmark became X.

What happened after that — the Twitter Files, rate limits, Grok inside the app, the Brazil block, the fold into SpaceXAI — belongs to the X era. This page stops at the handoff.