Who owns Twitter?

Twitter is an American microblogging and social networking service on which users can post and interact with messages known as "tweets." Twitter users can post, like, and retweet tweets using browsers or mobile frontend software or programmatically via its APIs.

Twitter was founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. The first Twitter prototype, developed by Dorsey and a contractor named Florian Weber, was used as an internal service for Odeo employees. The full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006.

In October 2006, the founders formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo together with Twitter.com. Twitter spun off into its own entity in April 2007. In 2007, the company achieved rapid growth following the South by Southwest Interactive conference. Twitter had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter in 2007.

By 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and had been described as the "SMS of the Internet." By the start of 2019, Twitter had more than 330 million monthly active users.

Annual revenue for Twitter was $3.459 billion in 2019, an increase of 13.71% from 2018, and they had approximately 7,500 employees.