Where does Elon Musk's immense fortune come from?
5:12
(CNN Spanish) --
Elon Musk got it.
After weeks of speculation, the company has finally accepted Twitter's takeover offer from the founder of Tesla and SpaceX.
Since last Monday, April 4, it was revealed that Musk had recently bought 9.2% of Twitter shares, making him the company's largest individual shareholder.
Just days earlier, on March 26, Musk had said in a tweet that he was "seriously" thinking about creating a new social media platform.
Both the tweet and the subsequent purchase of shares came after Musk's latest criticism of Twitter, in which he claimed that the platform does not allow freedom of expression.
And Musk didn't stop with stock acquisitions.
On April 14, it was reported that the businessman had made an offer to buy Twitter: he offered to acquire all the Twitter shares he does not own for $54.20 per share in cash, valuing the company at $43.4 billion.
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Musk said the cash offer was his "best and last offer," according to a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, adding that if it is not accepted, he will have to reconsider his position as a shareholder.
Given this scenario, we present a brief chronology of how Twitter emerged and the development it had in its early years, which led the platform to become the social network for breaking news.
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Brief history of Twitter
March 2006:
Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey, Christopher Isaac Stone, Noah E. Glass, Jeremy LaTrasse, and Evan Williams on March 21, 2006, with headquarters in San Francisco, California.
March 2006:
The first tweet was posted by co-founder Jack Dorsey, as part of an internal messaging system for Odeo, the podcasting company where Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams worked at the time.
He simply said the following: "I'm just setting up my twttr."
just setting up my twttr
—jack⚡️ (@jack) March 21, 2006
July 2006:
The full version of Twitter was released to the public on July 15, though Twitter didn't become its own company until the following year.
October 2006:
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Dorsey, Williams and Stone bought Odeo and created Obvious Corp. to further develop the final version of Twitter.
March 2007:
Although not yet widely used, Twitter gained enormous popularity among those who first encountered it at the South by Southwest (SXSW) interactive festival in Austin, Texas.
In a smart move, the company placed large screens in the halls of the conference showing live tweets about the SXSW event.
Interest grew rapidly, and by the end of the week, daily Twitter usage had tripled.
April 2007:
Following the success of SXSW, Britannica says, Twitter Inc. was created as a corporate entity thanks to an infusion of venture capital, and Dorsey became the company's first CEO.
2008:
In 2008, the encyclopedia adds, Williams removed Dorsey as CEO, and two years later Williams was replaced as CEO by COO Dick Costolo.
Some time later, in 2015, Dorsey would return to the CEO position.
April 2008:
In one of the first examples of the power of Twitter, an American college student used the platform to let his friends know that he had been arrested at an anti-government protest in Mahalla, Egypt.
After applying pressure, the authorities released him from jail the next day.
January 2009:
A US Airways plane with 155 people on board made a miraculous emergency landing in the Hudson River after hitting a bird on takeoff.
An eyewitness tweeted a photograph that was shared by many, of passengers waiting to be rescued on the plane's wing.
This cemented Twitter's status as a tool for delivering news in real time.
April 2009:
Actor Ashton Kutcher and CNN were in a race to become the first account to reach 1 million followers.
By a narrow margin, Kutcher won that title.
June 2009:
After the disputed elections in Iran, thousands of people took to the streets of Tehran to protest.
The Iranian government cracked down on media reports of the protests, so protesters took to Twitter to express themselves, inspiring the phrase "Twitter Revolution."
January 2010:
Astronaut Timothy Creamer sent the first live tweet from space with his account, Astro_TJ.
He wrote the following: "Hello Twitterverse! We're LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station, the first ever live tweet from space. We'll get back to you later; send in your questions."
January 2011:
Twitter and Facebook play a major role in the "Arab Spring" uprisings, when people in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Libya and other countries used social media to message each other and organize protests.
March 2011:
Just minutes after news outlets reported that an Egyptian cobra had escaped from its enclosure at the Bronx Zoo, an anonymous prankster created a witty Twitter account imagining the released snake visiting important places in the city from New York.
The account soon had more than 100,000 followers, and it was the beginning of a new wave of mocking comments on Twitter.
May 2011:
Sohaib Athar, an information technology consultant in Abbottabad, Pakistan, inadvertently live-tweeted the raid carried out by a special unit of the US military, which killed Osama bin Laden.
He did so after seeing helicopters flying over his neighborhood.
He later tweeted: "Oh no. Now I'm the guy who commented live on the Osama bin Laden raid without knowing it."
2015:
After his dismissal in 2008, Dorsey returned as CEO of Twitter in 2015, a position he held until November 2021. In those years, Jack Dorsey experienced moments of great pressure, especially in relation to President Donald Trump and his conflictive way to use the social network.
2021:
Trump's relationship with Twitter was so toxic that on January 8, 2021, the company permanently suspended the account of the still president of the United States after the uprising on Capitol Hill.
April 4, 2022:
Elon Musk announces that he bought 9.2% of Twitter shares, making him the company's largest single shareholder.
April 25, 2022:
Twitter accepts Elon Musk's buyout offer.
The business would be of US$ 44,000 million.
With information from Brandon Griggs and Heather Kelly*
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