Short answers, pulled from the story.
The first public version of Twitter arrived on the 15th of July 2006. The service began as a prototype project code named twttr before the team purchased the twitter.com domain six months after launching the prototype.
Jack Dorsey founded Twitter while working at Odeo in March 2006. The original concept allowed individuals to use SMS to broadcast short updates to a small group with a 140-character limit born from SMS technology.
Elon Musk acquired Twitter for 44 billion dollars in October 2022. Musk rebranded the service to X by May 2024 and retired the iconic bird logo in favor of a double-strike bold mathematical alphanumeric symbol for the letter X.
A major hack in July 2020 compromised 130 high-profile accounts including those of Barack Obama and Bill Gates. Scammers used social engineering to obtain employee credentials and sent bitcoin scam messages before Twitter intervened.
The original 140-character limit was doubled to 280 characters in 2017. The limit was eventually removed for paid subscribers in 2023.
The European Commission imposed a 120 million dollar fine on Twitter in December 2025 for alleged non-compliance with the Digital Services Act. This fine followed a 2024 report by the Federal Trade Commission finding that the company's data practices put individuals vulnerable to identity theft and stalking.