15 July 2006: Twitter opens to the public
Twitter, a side project from podcasting startup Odeo, launched publicly with a 140-character limit borrowed from text messaging. Early users posted what they had for lunch, and critics wondered what the point was. The point turned out to be news, politics, celebrity and endless arguments in real time. Monetizing all that attention proved far harder than attracting it, which became the recurring theme of Twitter's life as a public company.
The lesson: Attention is easy to attract and much harder to turn into reliable profits for shareholders.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Twitter at the start of 2015 → $1,506 today, vs $3,301 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 2015, the first year in our price data after the event. That is 1.5 times the money, but $1,795 less than a plain index fund made over the same years.
What Twitter teaches: Merger contracts matter; Twitter shareholders were paid a premium largely because the company's lawyers had written a deal that the buyer could not easily escape.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | $36.00 | $1,506 | $3,301 |
| 2018 | $24.00 | $2,258 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $32.00 | $1,694 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Twitter? Every starting year and the full story →
More Twitter history
- 21 March 2006: Jack Dorsey sends the first tweet
- 27 July 2018: Twitter follows Facebook off a cliff
- 6 November 2013: Twitter prices its IPO at $26
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
Play Sixty-40