Who Created Twitter? The 4 Founders and Their Story

Twitter was created in 2006 in San Francisco by four people: Jack Dorsey, who had the idea, Noah Glass, who came up with the name, Evan Williams, who paid for it, and Biz Stone. It all started at Odeo, a podcasting startup that was running out of road. The first tweet went out on March 21, 2006, and the service opened to the public on July 15, 2006. Elon Musk only showed up in 2022, as a buyer. If you want to write your own story on the platform, our X followers help you get your account off the ground.

Who are the four founders of Twitter?

If you want a single name, the short answer is Jack Dorsey. He pitched the idea and sent the very first tweet. But the official story counts four co-founders, each with a very different role.

• Jack Dorsey, born in 1976 in St. Louis, a developer at Odeo. Since his teens he had been fascinated by dispatch systems for taxis and couriers, where everyone keeps reporting where they are and what they’re doing. Twitter takes that idea: a short status shared with the people you know.
• Noah Glass, co-founder of Odeo. He pushed the project internally when almost nobody believed in it and came up with the name “twttr”.
• Evan Williams, born in 1972, already known for creating Blogger, which he sold to Google in 2003. He funded Odeo, then bought out the investors to keep Twitter.
• Biz Stone, born in 1974 in Boston, a former Google employee who followed Williams to Odeo. He shaped the product’s voice and its communication.

A fifth name sometimes comes up: Florian Weber, a German contractor for Odeo who coded the first prototype with Dorsey. He is not counted among the founders.

How was the idea born at Odeo?

In 2005, Odeo wanted to be the home of podcasts. The problem: Apple built podcasts into iTunes that same year, and the startup was left with no future. Evan Williams asked the team to come up with new directions, during brainstorming days where everyone worked on their own idea.

In early 2006, Dorsey pitched his: a service where you send a short text message saying what you’re doing, received by a group of friends. Work started in February 2006. Noah Glass went looking for a name and found “twitter” in the dictionary, defined as a short burst of bird chirps and a burst of inconsequential information. It first became twttr, without vowels, in the style of Flickr.

On March 21, 2006 at 12:50 p.m. Pacific time, Dorsey posted the first tweet: “just setting up my twttr”. The service first worked as an internal messaging tool for Odeo, then opened to the public on July 15, 2006. The 140-character limit came from text messages, capped at 160: that left 20 characters for the username.

In October 2006, Williams, Stone and Dorsey formed Obvious Corporation and bought Odeo and its assets back from the investors. Twitter became a company of its own in April 2007. The breakthrough came in March 2007 at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, where daily tweets jumped from about 20,000 to 60,000 during the event.

The logo has its own story too. The blue bird, nicknamed Larry inside the company, was redrawn in 2012 using nothing but circles, as this designer’s video shows:

Why was Noah Glass forgotten?

This is the least known part, and in my view the most interesting one. Noah Glass championed Twitter inside Odeo, found the name and led the small early team. Yet in 2006, Evan Williams fired him. When Obvious Corporation bought Odeo a few months later, Glass was no longer part of it.

He stayed quiet for five years. He only told his side in 2011, in a long Business Insider investigation into the real history of Twitter. In 2013, journalist Nick Bilton’s book Hatching Twitter went through the rivalries in detail: four founders, three pushed out one after another, and one almost erased from the official story.

The Glass case explains why answers to “who created Twitter” vary so much from site to site. Many name only Dorsey, Williams and Stone. The most solid sources, including the company’s own history, count four.

Who ran Twitter before Elon Musk?

Leadership changed often, and rarely smoothly. Here are the successive CEOs:

1. Jack Dorsey, from 2006 to October 2008, pushed out by the board.
2. Evan Williams, from 2008 to October 2010.
3. Dick Costolo, from 2010 to 2015. Under him, Twitter went public on November 7, 2013, at $26 a share, closing the day at $44.90.
4. Jack Dorsey again, from 2015 to November 29, 2021.
5. Parag Agrawal, from November 29, 2021 to October 27, 2022, fired on the day of the takeover.
6. Elon Musk, owner since October 27, 2022, who handed the CEO job to Linda Yaccarino from June 5, 2023 to July 9, 2025.

Along the way, users invented a good part of the platform’s vocabulary. Chris Messina proposed the hashtag on August 23, 2007, long before Twitter officially adopted it. The limit went from 140 to 280 characters in November 2017. The network then changed its name in July 2023 and became X.

What are the founders doing in 2026?

None of the four works for X anymore. Their paths have gone in very different directions.

Jack Dorsey runs Block, the payments company he founded as Square in 2009. He left Twitter’s board in May 2022, then the board of Bluesky, the network he had helped start, in May 2024. In 2025 he released Bitchat, a messaging app that works over Bluetooth with no internet connection, and backed diVine, a reboot of the short video app Vine. A well-known footnote: his first tweet sold as an NFT for $2.9 million in March 2021.

Evan Williams founded Medium in 2012 and stepped down as its CEO in 2022. In 2024 he launched Mozi, a small private social network for keeping up with friends. Biz Stone co-founded the Q&A app Jelly, bought by Pinterest in 2017, and invests in startups. Noah Glass has stayed out of the spotlight.

What can their story teach you for your X account?

Twitter’s history holds a few very practical lessons for anyone posting on X in 2026. Here is how to put them to work:

1. Start small. The first tweet ever is five ordinary words. Your first post doesn’t need to be perfect, it needs to exist.
2. Post during live events. Twitter took off at South by Southwest because everyone was commenting on the same thing at the same time. On X, reacting live to a game, a show or a conference is still the best way to get seen.
3. Use one or two precise hashtags, as in Chris Messina’s day, to join an existing conversation instead of trying to start one.
4. Help your posts get going. The algorithm watches early reactions. A few X likes in the first hour signal that the post deserves to be shown.
5. Bet on sharing. Twitter was built on the retweet, which users invented themselves. X retweets on your best content carry it beyond your followers.

And if you’re still not sure you want to stay, our guide on how to delete a Twitter account covers every option, including giving your account a fresh start.