Twitter has been through so many changes since Elon Musk took over and its alternatives have grown and died. We now take an overall look(significant changes) at what has happened over at Twitter since Elon took it private.
- April 2022: Elon Musk shows interest in buying Twitter by snapping a 9.2% stake on Twitter making him the largest shareholder on Twitter. He gets a board seat(this tweet by Jack aged poorly), and rejects it to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share. After back and forth, the incendiary tech mogul struck a deal to take Twitter private for $44 billion.
- October 2022: Elon Musk closes his Twitter acquisition for $44 billion. He immediately fired Parag, Ned, Sean and Vijaya who were the former CEO, CFO, general counsel and head of legal at Twitter respectively. During the same month, he overhauls the platform’s verification with paid Twitter Blue.
- November 2022: Twitter rolled out Twitter Blue and it was a mess as this led to the creation of fake accounts posing to be celebrities, influential people and brands. Elon ended remote work and laid off half of Twitter’s staff with execs leaving as well.
- December 2022: Twitter’s fact-checking system, Community Notes goes global which is still the most fun thing about Twitter even now in 2024 as people get dunked on. Twitter also relaunched Blue with new pricing plus added the gold checkmark for brands(company accounts) and the ability of Blue users to post 60-minute 1080p videos. This was the month that legacy verified accounts had the may or may not be notable pop-up. Twitter also killed Revue and temporarily suspended Spaces. They also launched view counts for tweets
- January 2023: Twitter removed the ban on posting political ads to increase revenue, makes the for you timeline default but updates to let the web and app remember your previous timeline. Twitter also kills off third-party apps and brings the bookmark feature to the iOS app.
- February 2023: Twitter kills off its co-tweets feature, announces monetized access to API and shares ad revenue with creators. This was also the month Twitter Bue users could post 4000-character tweets.
- March 2023:Twitter announced plans to shut down legacy verified checkmarks in April plus introduced API tiers including a free tier for bots.
- April 2023: Twitter starts mislabelling news media accounts, makes NPR quit Twitter. Twitter also started limiting Substack links. It was also this month that Twitter changed to X Corp and shuts down legacy checkmarks in favour of Blue accounts. Twitter allows Blue users to post 10,000-character tweets
- May 2023: Twitter gets new CEO in the form of former NBCU leader – Linda Yaccarino as Elon switches to CTO and executive chairman of Twitter. Blue users can now upload 2-hour videos limited to 8GB and 1080p resolution.
- June 2023: Linda becomes Twitter CEO officially. Blue users get the ability to edit tweets in under an hour instead of 30 minutes. The character limit is also increased to 25,000 for Blue users. Twitter began limiting the number of tweets users can read to 1000 tweets for regular users and 10,000 tweets for Blue users. Tweetdeck becomes only accessible to blue users and verified organizations.
- July 2023: Twitter threatens Meta over Threads app, blocks links to the app, begins sharing ad revenue with verified creators. Twitter brings jobs listing feature. Twitter becomes X across its properties on Twitter including owning the x.com domain that redirects to twitter.com – the company took over the @x account without notifying the original owner. X takes ad revenue sharing globally with eligible creators.
- August 2023: Blue X users can now hide their checkmarks. Tweetdeck renamed to XPro(@pro). Twitter takes over @music account – no notifying the original owner. Video calls coming to X. Linda says that the company is breaking even. X Pro Blue users lower requirements for creator payout programs. The Highlights tabs starts rolling out for blue users. X plans to hide headlines from news links. X blue users can now hide their likes.
- September 2023: X starts running unlabelled ads in the following feed timeline. X is no longer a free website. X announced plan to shut down the circle feature, a feature similar to Instagram’s Close Friends that allowed users to post tweets to a select group of followers.
- October 2023: X cuts headlines from link previews, plans to roll out three premium tiers(Premium Plus, Premium Standard and Premium Basic), and introduces the ability to limit replies for verified users. X global site traffic goes down and kills off the circle feature.
- November 2023: Job search feature goes live, high-profile advertisers suspend spending and Elon tells advertisers “to go f*k themselves” at the DealBook conference, Elon brings back headlines to link previews
- December 2023: x turns to SMB’s for ad spend after major advertisers flee. xAI grok accessible to X Premium+ users, brings Alex Jones and Infowars back
- January 2024: X removes support NFT profile pictures which was launched in early 2022, temporarily suspends some journalists, launched Verirfed Organizations program for small businesses($200), announces plan to hire 100 moderators for its new Trust and Safety team that will be based in Texas in its effort to appease lawmakers, brings support for passkey which is more secure way to login as it relies of biometric authentication, rolls out audio and video calls but with limits to who can call as this feature is exclusive to Blue users – you can disable this feature in settings.
