X, formerly (and still colloquially) known as Twitter, is a social media website based in the United

States. With over 500 million users, it is one of the world's largest social networks. Users can share
and post text messages, images, and videos known historically as "tweets".[4] X also includes direct
messaging, video and audio calling, bookmarks, lists and communities, and Spaces, a social audio
feature. Users can vote on context added by approved users using the Community Notes feature.
Although the service is now called X, the primary URL remains twitter.com as of January 2024, with
the x.com domain name redirecting to that address.

The service is owned by the American company X Corp., the successor of Twitter, Inc. Twitter was
created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. It was launched
in July of that year. Twitter, Inc., was based in San Francisco, California and had more than 25
offices around the world.[5] A signature characteristic of the service was that message posts were
required to be brief (originally 140 characters, later expanded to 280 in 2017). By 2012, more than
100 million users produced 340 million tweets per day.[6][7] By the start of 2019, Twitter had more than
330 million monthly active users.[8] The majority of tweets is produced by a minority of users.[9][10] In
2020, it was estimated that approximately 48 million accounts (15% of all accounts) were not
genuine people.[11] As of October 2023, X is the fifth most-visited website in the world.[12][13]

In October 2022, billionaire Elon Musk acquired Twitter for US$44 billion, gaining control of the
platform and becoming CEO.[14][15][16][17] Since the acquisition, the platform has been criticized for
increasing the spread of disinformation,[18][19][20] hate speech,[21][22][23] antisemitism,[24][25] homophobia, and
transphobia.[26][27] Linda Yaccarino succeeded Musk as CEO on June 5, 2023, with Musk remaining as
Chairman and CTO.[28][29][30] In July 2023, Musk announced that Twitter would be rebranded to X and
that the bird logo would be retired.[31][32] In October 2023, the company estimated its value at about
$19 billion, down about 55 percent from the purchase price one year earlier. [33] Fidelity at about the
same time estimated the value to be down 65 percent from its purchase price. [34] In December 2023,
Fidelity further estimated the value to be down 71.5 percent from its purchase price. [35]

"Twitter all began with status-sharing service TXTmob," explains an article on TNW.[36] Tad Hirsch, a
student and activist associated with the Ruckus Society, the Institute for Applied Autonomy, and later
the MIT Media Lab, built the basic first application to help activists organize protests at the 2004
Republican National Convention.[37][36][38][39] Inspired by TXTmob and other SMS sharing applications of
the day, members of the podcasting company Odeo had an "all-day brainstorming session" to decide
on building a new application. Jack Dorsey, then an undergraduate student, claims to have
introduced the group to the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small
group.[40] The original project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that Williams later ascribed
to Noah Glass,[41] 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.[42] The developers initially considered "10958" as the service's short
code for SMS text messaging, but later changed it to "40404" for "ease of use and memorability".
[43]
Work on the project started in February 2006.[44] Dorsey published the first Twitter message on
March 21, 2006, at 12:50 p.m. PST (UTC−08:00): "just setting up my twttr".[45] Dorsey has explained
the origin of the "Twitter" title:[46]