Sales 2023: $ 3.400 billion (€3.144 billion)

Overview

In October 2022, Elon Musk, then the world's richest person (ranked second in June 2024, according to Forbes, with $180 billion), acquired the microblogging service Twitter for $44 billion and renamed it X. Since then, X/Twitter seems to have been in quite a mess: "Hardly anything he (Musk) has done since buying Twitter looks like good business sense." (Guardian, November 22, 2022) X/Twitter fell from fifth place among the world's most visited websites (October 2023) to 58th place (June 2024, semrush).

An updated, complete company profile will be published shortly.

General Information

Headquarters
1355 Market Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
USA
Telephone: 001 415 222 9670
website: x.com

industry: Microblogging service
legal form: Public limited company (delisted)
fiscal year: 01.01-31.12.
founding year: 2006

Basic economic data (in million US dollars)

	2023	2022	2021	2020	2019	2018
Revenue	3.400	4.400	5.077	3.716	3.459	3.042
Profit (Loss)	n/a	n/a	(221)	(1.136)	1.466	1.206
Share price (year-end, in $)	n/a	n/a	43,22	54,15	31,52	29,95
Employees	1.000	1.300	7.500	5.500	4.900	3.920

Executives and Directors

Management (2021):  

• Parag Agrawal, CEO
• Ned Segal, CFO
• Vijaya Gadde, Chief Legal Officer and Secretary
• Leslie Berland, Chief Marketing Officer
• Kayvon Beykpour, GM of Consumer
• Dalana Brand, Chief People and Diversity Officer
• Nick Caldwell, GM of Core Tech
• Bruce Falck, GM of Revenue
• Lindsey Iannucci, Chief of Staff and VP of Operations
• Sarah Personette, Chief Customer Officer

 
Board of Directors (2021):

• Parag Agrawal, CEO
• Mimi Alemayehou, Senior Vice President for Public-Private Partnership at Mastercard
• Jack Dorsey, Former CEO and Co-Founder, Twitter
• Egon Durban, Co-CEO Silver Lake
• Martha Lane Fox, Founder and Chairperson, Lucky Voice Group Ltd.
• Omid Kordestani, Former Executive Chairman, Twitter
• Dr. Fei-Fei Li, Professor, Stanford University
• Patrick Pichette, General Partner, Inovia Capital
• David Rosenblatt, CEO, 1stdibs.com
• Bret Taylor, Vice Chair of the Board and Co-Chief Executive Officer of
  Salesforce.com, Inc.
• Robert Zoellick, Former Chairman of the Board of Directors, AllianceBernstein Holding LP

History

"Just setting up my twttr." This was the title of the first short message sent over the Twitter network on March 21, 2006, and triggered nothing less than a revolution in modern communication. Twitter was developed jointly by programmers Noah Glass, Jack Dorsey, and Biz Stone, as well as internet entrepreneur Evan Williams. Glass, who, along with German programmer Florian Weber, played a key role in the conception and implementation of the project, was fired in 2007 due to personal differences with Williams and removed from the official company history. The Twitter founders were originally working on a podcasting portal called Odeo, but competition from Apple's iTunes Store and the realization that they themselves had no interest in the medium caused them to rethink their approach.

They noticed that they were spending more and more time using a tool that allowed calls to a central phone number, which were then converted into MP3 recordings on a website—the original idea that would become Twitter. In 2006, this idea was modified. The concept now involved sending a text message to a central number, which would then be forwarded online to all friends. In Web 2.0 jargon, this represented a shift in strategy from "podcast" to "status." The name "twttr," inspired by the photo-sharing portal Flckr, prevailed over suggestions like "FriendStalker" or "Dodgeball."

Twitter's potential as a communications and news medium first became apparent in August 2006, when a minor earthquake struck San Francisco. News of the disaster spread in real time among the few thousand Twitter users at the time, while other news outlets reported on it belatedly. The following fall, Twitter (still part of Odeo) was presented to the company's investors. However, they showed little interest in the idea and withdrew completely from Odeo/Twitter, selling their shares to founder Evan Williams for five million US dollars. Five years later, these shares had increased in value a thousandfold. This led some of the early investors to speak negatively of Williams, alleging that he had deceived investors by downplaying Twitter's true potential and portraying the buyback of the supposedly worthless shares as a noble act.

After repurchasing the shares, Williams renamed Odeo Obvious Corp. and became CEO of Twitter in 2008. As he had correctly predicted, being a majority shareholder in Twitter paid off in the years to come. User numbers exploded: From 2006 to 2011, the number of Twitter accounts rose from 5,000 to more than 100 million. Twitter's importance as a political communications tool became particularly evident in 2009, when the US government asked Twitter management to postpone maintenance work on its servers in order not to jeopardize the student protests against a rigged election in Iran, which were being directed via Twitter.

In the face of this growth, Evan Williams became increasingly overwhelmed and in 2009 installed the more experienced Richard "Dick" Costolo as the new CEO. It was Costolo who then developed the monetization strategy. The business model has since consisted of placing ads as sponsored posts in feeds or under the most popular tweets sorted by topic ("trending topics"). Costolo's idea was also that Twitter should act as an information network rather than a "social community." Twitter's corporate philosophy ("Be a force for good") thus reflected the supposedly important role that social networks were given in relation to the upheavals of the Arab Spring. By integrating video live streaming, Twitter then wanted to assert itself in the rapidly changing "social media" world.

Twitter's IPO in 2013 brought in more than a billion dollars. After a strong start, however, the share price plummeted by 42 percent in 2014. This was due to slowly growing user numbers; regular usage among registered users was also declining. The integration of Twitter into the TV ecosystem was intended to generate more profits. In April 2013, a multi-million dollar advertising deal was brokered with media planning giant Starcom, linking Twitter ads with TV content. A similar agreement followed with Omnicom in 2014. The advertising tool Twitter Amplify, which has been joined by Time Inc., Discovery Communications, Condé Nast, Bloomberg, and Comcast, among others, is similarly structured. A collaboration with Microsoft's search engine Bing for the automatic translation of tweets was also brokered.

As more and more viewers were active on social networks via smartphone or tablet, a Nielsen study in June 2013 claimed that Twitter activity was driving up the ratings of TV series. The example cited was the ABC series "Scandal," which, thanks to Twitter discussions, went from being a moderately successful format to a ratings hit. In times when traditional, linear television is losing viewers, experts increasingly view Twitter as a lifeline. Content providers therefore want to cooperate with Twitter on "second-screen" activities. Twitter also became increasingly important for the music market. After Twitter's in-house music app was not accepted by users, the company specialized in analyzing users' music preferences.

Twitter experienced significant growth during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, the platform was increasingly used to spread misinformation related to the pandemic. Twitter subsequently began flagging tweets containing misleading information. In May 2020, two tweets from US President Donald Trump were flagged as "potentially misleading." Later, Trump was banned entirely, citing violations of the "glorification of violence policy." This drew criticism from conservatives and some European politicians, who viewed it as an infringement on freedom of expression.

management

At the end of November 2021, Indian Parag Agrawal, born in Rajasthan in 1984, took over as CEO of Twitter, succeeding Jack Dorsey. Agrawal joined Twitter as a software engineer in 2011 and rose to Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in 2017. However, at the end of October 2022, he was terminated. Elon Musk, the world's second-richest person (according to Forbes' 2022 ranking), had taken over Twitter and immediately fell out with Agrawal. According to Handelsblatt, Musk published a doctored photo in which Agrawal's head was superimposed on a picture of dictator Joseph Stalin. Musk then announced "significant improvements for Twitter within the coming months." On October 27, 2022, Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, and Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde were forced to leave. However, with a “golden handshake”: According to the SEC, CEO Agrawal received a severance payment of $65 million, CFO Segal $66 million, and Vijaya Gadde $74 million.

Business segments

Twitter mainly operates the eponymous MicrobloggingService: a social network, a communication platform for individuals, organizations, companies, and mass media for the distribution of short text messages of up to 280 characters (or 4000 characters in the paid version), as well as images and videos. In contrast to Facebook Contact with acquaintances is not the focus here. In January 2010, "tweet" was chosen by the American Dialect Society as the 2009 Word of the Year.

Current developments

Current developments on Twitter have a name: Elon Musk. Daily headlines around the world feature the entrepreneur (born June 28, 1971, a South African, Canadian, and, since 2002, US citizen), currently the second-richest person in the world with a fortune of approximately $185 billion.

Musk, also known as the CEO and key figure of the electric car manufacturer Tesla, as well as the founder and majority owner of the space company SpaceX, acquired Twitter in October 2022, after much controversy, for $44 billion. One of the largest deals ever to take a company private, and according to experts, one of the most overpaid tech acquisitions in history. A realistic value for the platform is likely around $25 billion. After Musk's takeover, Twitter was criticized for increasingly allowing hate speech and for mass layoffs. Things aren't going well. According to Spiegel on December 14, 2022, it appears that Twitter hasn't been paying rent for weeks. At the same time, Elon Musk is destroying Tesla's good reputation in Germany. The US electric car manufacturer now ranks last behind VW, BMW, Opel, and others.

According to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on December 21, 2022, Musk has now announced that he will step down as CEO of Twitter once he has found a successor. He had previously lost a poll about his future as Twitter CEO. Users voted 57.5 percent in favor of Musk stepping down from his position, with 42.5 percent voting against.