Short answers, pulled from the story.
Twitter began work in February 2006 with Jack Dorsey and Florian Weber building an internal tool for their startup Odeo. The public launch arrived on the 15th of July 2006 after the team purchased the domain twitter.com six months later.
The original strict limit required every post to stay under 140 characters of text. Subscribers gained the ability to create posts up to 4,000 characters starting in 2023 while the allowance doubled to 280 characters in 2017.
X Corp. was acquired by xAI Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company in March 2025 valuing the platform at $33 billion with a full valuation of $45 billion including debt. Linda Yaccarino stepped down from her role as CEO in July 2025 following the acquisition.
A report released on the 21st of October 2021 analyzed millions of tweets sent between April 1 and the 15th of August 2020 showing machine learning algorithms amplified right-leaning politics on personalized user Home timelines across seven countries. Researchers used the 2019 Chapel Hill Expert Survey to position parties on political ideology within each nation.
On the 25th of May 2022 the Federal Trade Commission fined Twitter $150 million for collecting phone numbers and email addresses for targeted advertising. The European Commission issued a €120 million fine in December 2025 for alleged non-compliance with Digital Services Act requirements.