However, overall it made a small loss of $7 million, and had long-term debt of $686 million. Last year, Skype had revenue of $860 million on which it posted an operating profit of $264 million. (The former president was banned from the service in 2021 for using it to incite violence.) Like other social media companies, Twitter has faced intense pressure to police the content on the site more closely to prevent harassment, hate speech and disinformation, as well as better protect its users’ privacy.Just days after reports that Google and Facebook were interested in partnering with, and possibly buying VoIP company Skype, Microsoft announced that it was buying the company for $8.56 billion in cash. The company’s prominence rose with the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, who was outspoken on Twitter throughout his campaign and often tweeted policy decisions or other announcements during his administration. Though Twitter’s user base is much smaller than that of Facebook (which has more than 2.9 billion monthly active users as of 2022), it has increasingly become a source of breaking news and information, especially for younger users.
That November, when the company went public, it was valued at just over $31 billion. By 2013, the New York Times reported that the company had more than 2,000 employees and more than 200 million active users. Use of Twitter exploded at the South by Southwest convention in Austin, Texas, in March 2007, when more than 60,000 tweets were sent per day, and grew rapidly from there. Once the service went public, its founders imposed a 140-character limit for messages, based on the maximum length of text messages at the time this was later expanded to 280 characters.
Within six months after the launch, Twttr had become Twitter. That fall, according to a report in Business Insider, Williams bought out the company’s investors, changed Odeo’s name to Obvious Corporation and fired Glass, whose role in the birth of Twitter (including coming up with its name) wouldn’t become public until years later. At the time Twttr launched to the public in July 2006, it was still a side project of Odeo, while the company’s primary offering, the podcasting platform, was going nowhere.
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