Twitter opened its first day of trading at $45.10, 73 percent above the price its bankers set the night before. By 2013 the short public post had become how news broke, how celebrities talked to fans, and how protests got organized. The San Francisco company had hundreds of millions of users and a young ad business. Facebook had stumbled through its own debut the year before, and every investor wanted to see if Twitter would do better.

A Side Project at Odeo

Twitter began in 2006 inside Odeo, a San Francisco podcasting startup. Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Noah Glass built a service for sending short status updates, sized to fit in a text message. The bet was that tiny public posts, stacked into a live feed, would add up to something people checked all day. Users invented the hashtag and the retweet themselves. The company later built its business on ads placed inside that feed.

A Pop, Then a Takeover

Twitter sold 70 million shares at $26 each on November 6, 2013, raising $1.82 billion. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange the next day and closed at $44.90. Profits came slowly in the years that followed. In October 2022 Elon Musk bought the company for about $44 billion and took it private. He renamed it X in July 2023. In March 2025 his AI company, xAI, acquired X in an all-stock deal.

Cover: Sparrow and bamboo, Utagawa Hiroshige. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a small songbird on a branch (the tweet).