Five logos, six CEOs and 450 million monthly active users later, a look at Twitter’s 17-year journey

Twitter was co-founded by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in 2006. Dorsey was the first CEO of the firm and in the 17 years since its establishment, Twitter has seen six CEOs with Linda Yaccarino being the latest one.

In 2008, Dorsey was fired from his position as CEO, but he returned to the company in 2015.

Jack Dorsey (2006–2008)

Evan Williams (2008–2010)

Dick Costolo (2010–2015)

Jack Dorsey (2015–2021); second term

Parag Agrawal (2021–2022)

Elon Musk (2022–2023)

Linda Yaccarino (current)

In November 2021, Parag Agrawal, a software engineer known to a few outside Twitter, replaced Jack Dorsey as CEO. When Dorsey abruptly stepped down as Twitter CEO, he handed the reins to Agrawal, a software engineer who had become one of his closest allies in shaping the social media company's future.

Indians all over the world took pride in yet another Indian taking the top spot at a US-headquartered firm, but that bout was short-lived.

Analysts say Elon Musk overspent when he decided to buy Twitter for a whopping $44 billion. ”Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” Musk tweeted in October 2022.

Ever since the takeover, Musk has come up with multiple restrictions and limits to the usage of Twitter. Some of the first few blows included massive layoffs to cut costs and paid verification service for Twitter Blue.

Following the paid verification move, a 240-character limit on posts, the latest change introduced by Musk is limiting the number of tweets various accounts can read per day. He said verified accounts will have a temporary limitation of 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts will be limited to 600 posts per day. Additionally, new unverified accounts will have a daily limit of 300 posts.

Musk unveiled the new “X” logo to replace Twitter's famous blue bird as he follows through with a major rebranding of the social media platform.

The X started appearing at the top of the desktop version of Twitter on Monday, but the bird was still dominant across the smartphone apps.

This is the fifth time that the log has changed.

Twitter’s pre-launch logo version was a rounded typeface in green with the text - Twttr. Its first official logo then in 2006 was a simple wordmark featuring a unique rounded typeface, with the letters in small caps and no spacing between them. This logo was used for four years before the introduction of the Twitter bird.

In 2010, the Twitter bird icon was introduced as the founders decided to add something that would reflect its identity. The bird was placed to the right of the wordmark, which remained unchanged except for the colour switch to black. The bird was to symbolise the nature of a tweet—quick and short.

Two years later in 2012, the name was dropped from the logo and it was only the little bird. The company’s management saw the need to refresh the brand’s image, with an emphasis on even greater simplicity.

Now, the bird has flown and a white X on a black background is up the site

Musk, CEO of Tesla, has long been fascinated with the letter X and renamed Twitter's corporate name to X Corp. after he bought it in October. In response to questions about what tweets would be called when the rebranding is done, Musk said they would be called Xs.

The billionaire is also the CEO of rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly known as SpaceX. And he started an artificial intelligence company this month called xAI to compete with ChatGPT. In 1999, he founded a startup called X.com, an online financial services company now known as PayPal.

Additionally, he calls one of his sons, whose mother is singer Grimes, “X.” The child’s actual name is a collection of letters and symbols.