What if you bought Twitter in 2015?
US Tech · Social. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play1.5× · S&P 500 same money: $3,301
$1,000 in Twitter at the start of 2015 would be worth about $1,506 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
What happened: Twitter taken private in 2022.
The story
Twitter was founded in 2006 and quickly became the public square for journalists, politicians and anyone who wanted to argue with them. Its cultural influence was always far larger than its business. It went public in 2013 and soared on the first day, but user growth stalled soon after, advertising revenue disappointed, and executive turnover was constant. Co-founder Jack Dorsey returned as chief executive in 2015, while still running Square, and a 2016 sale process attracted interest but no buyer.
The shares fell well below their IPO-day levels and spent years stuck there. Then in 2022 Elon Musk built a stake, joined and then declined a board seat, and offered 54.20 dollars a share to buy the whole company. Weeks later he tried to walk away, and Twitter sued to force the deal; facing trial in Delaware, Musk closed it in October 2022 and took the company private. Shareholders got their cash. Twitter was renamed X, and its valuation as a private company fell sharply after the deal.
The lesson: 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.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| 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
Best entry point in our set: 2018, turning $1,000 into $2,258. The S&P 500 from that same year: $2,519.
On this day
- 21 March 2006: Jack Dorsey sends the first tweet
- 15 July 2006: Twitter opens to the public
- 27 July 2018: Twitter follows Facebook off a cliff
- 6 November 2013: Twitter prices its IPO at $26
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Twitter is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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