When Was Twitter (X) Created? The Complete Timeline (2006–2026)

The specific date most historians use for Twitter's creation is March 21, 2006 — the day Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet: "just setting up my twttr". That tweet is still live on X as post ID 20.

The public launch (when anyone could sign up) came four months later, on July 15, 2006. Depending on which milestone you cite, Twitter's founding date is either "March 2006" (first internal use) or "July 2006" (public launch). Both are correct — they just answer slightly different questions.

Four people are widely credited as Twitter's co-founders:

• Jack Dorsey — proposed the original SMS-style status service and posted the first tweet.
• Noah Glass — named the product "twttr" and led early product work. Later pushed out; his role went underreported for years.
• Biz Stone — early engineer; shaped Twitter's public voice through the late 2000s.
• Evan Williams — CEO of parent company Odeo, funded the initial work and later served as Twitter's CEO.

Twitter was spun out of Odeo (a podcasting startup that was struggling once Apple bundled podcasts into iTunes) and incorporated as Obvious Corporation in 2007 before becoming Twitter, Inc.

Twitter's early trajectory ran on live-event moments. Highlights:

• 2007 — SXSW breakout. Twitter installed screens showing live tweets at the SXSW conference and traffic tripled overnight.
• 2008 — Verified accounts. The blue checkmark launched to combat impersonation, initially targeting public figures.
• 2009 — "Hudson miracle" tweet. The photo of US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson was the moment mainstream media accepted Twitter as a news source. Grabbing that image today takes seconds via our screenshot downloader.
• 2010–2011 — Arab Spring. Twitter became inseparable from real-time protest coverage.
• 2013 — IPO. Twitter listed on the NYSE on November 7, 2013 at $26/share, valuing it at $14.2B on day one.

As a public company, Twitter never quite matched Facebook's ad revenue but maintained cultural dominance:

• 2017 — 280 characters. The character limit doubled from 140 to 280 for most languages.
• 2020 — COVID and misinformation. Twitter added fact-check labels and, in early 2021, permanently suspended Donald Trump.
• April 14, 2022. Elon Musk offered $54.20/share to take Twitter private — the deal that would eventually become the acquisition.

See our Elon acquisition timeline for the full 2022 saga.

The transformation into X unfolded across three years:

• October 27, 2022. Musk's acquisition closed at $44 billion; Musk walked into HQ carrying a sink.
• Late 2022. Roughly 75% of staff left within months via layoffs and resignations.
• April 24, 2023. Legacy verification was removed; the blue check became a paid subscription.
• July 23, 2023. The Twitter brand and iconic blue bird were replaced with X, the black-and-white logo we know today.
• 2024–2026. X shifted heavily toward long-form posts, video, payments, and creator revenue-share programs. That video pivot is why standalone tools like our bulk downloader are more useful than ever — creators post more clips per day than at any point in the platform's history.

The twitter.com URL still resolves — it 301-redirects to x.com.

The name emerged during a brainstorming session at Odeo. Noah Glass and Jack Dorsey landed on twttr (a Web 2.0-era vowel-drop popularized by Flickr) as a nod to the sound of short bursts of information — the chirp of a bird. The full "Twitter" spelling was adopted before the public launch. If you want to see how the modern feed compares to that first year, our using-X guide reconstructs a calm, chronological Twitter experience inside 2026 X.

Twenty years later, when Musk renamed the company X, he was reviving a brand he'd used for the online-payments company that eventually became PayPal in 1999. The bird logo — designed in 2012 by Martin Grasser, Todd Waterbury, and Angy Che, and named "Larry" after basketball player Larry Bird — was retired after 11 years. Both the bird era and the X era are archived in our HD downloader — any legacy tweet URL still resolves, and its media still saves as a clean MP4.

A quick lookup table for the milestones people ask about most:

• Twitter founded: March 21, 2006 (first tweet); July 15, 2006 (public launch)
• Twitter incorporated: April 2007
• Verified accounts launched: June 2009
• Twitter IPO: November 7, 2013 at $26/share
• Character limit doubled: November 7, 2017
• Musk offer to buy: April 14, 2022
• Acquisition closes: October 27, 2022 at $44B
• Rebrand to X: July 23, 2023