text: The service is owned by the American company X Corp., which was established to succeed the prior owner Twitter, Inc. in March 2023 following the October 2022 acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk for US$44 billion. Musk stated that his goal with the acquisition was to promote free speech on the platform. Since his acquisition, the platform has been criticized for enabling the increased spread of disinformation and hate speech. Linda Yaccarino succeeded Musk as CEO on June 5, 2023, with Musk remaining as the chairman and the chief technology officer. In July 2023, Musk announced that Twitter would be rebranded to X and the bird logo would be retired. Branding changes were rolled out over the following year and completed in May 2024. In December 2023, Fidelity estimated the value of the company to be down 71.5 percent from its purchase price. Since Musk's takeover, data from app-tracking firms has shown that global usage of X has declined by approximately 15 percent, compared to a decline of 5 to 10 percent in some other social media sites. X has disputed that usage has dropped at all, with Musk claiming that the site had grown to 600 million users  post on X.
  History
  2006–2007: Creation and initial reaction