Earlier Lives

Noah’s vibrating phone led him to think of the brain impulses that cause a muscle to twitch. So he continued flipping through the tw’s in the dictionary. Twister. Twist tie. Twit. Twitch. Twitcher. Twitchy. Twite. And then, there it was.

A verb. Twitter. Twitter. Twittered. Twittering. Tw...

At that point Ev had received more offers to buy Twitter than he could count. Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, a former vice president, celebrities, and rappers had all made overtures toward Twitter, and each time Ev had said no. 

But it wasn’t about the money for Ev, it was about prote...

Mike Abbott, who was vice president of engineering at Twitter, 

“I need your help,” Abbott told Jack. “We have no direction at Twitter, and I don’t know where the company is going.”

The problem was Ev. He was still unable to make a decision. He communicated infrequently with the board...

 In December 2009, Dick had been instrumental in striking a deal with Google and Bing to make the nearly forty million tweets being sent across the site each day viewable on their respective search engines. In exchange Google had agreed to pay $ 15 million to Twitter. Microsoft would hand over $ ...

Jack was hired as a freelancer almost immediately and fit into the culture of Odeo seamlessly. He had a hacker mentality, no degree, and a love for programming. 

The site they had just unintentionally launched hoped to be the Web’s central destination for podcasts. All of this would be comp...

Noah was writing an application called Odeo or audio blogger, that allowed anyone to post voice-based posts to blogs from a phone. 

As soon as Ev started cashing out his Google stock, Noah asked if he would invest a few thousand dollars to help kick-start the idea. 

Ev agreed to finan...

A simple status updater( jacks view) in 140-character posts was too ephemeral and egotistical to be sustainable.

A news updater(Ev’s view) in 140-character spurts was just a glorified newswire.

Though they didn’t realize it, the two together were what made Twitter different. 

Noah was also becoming paranoid about Ev.

Ev explained Noah . “ I don’t think we can work together well on it.” 

Ev ordered Noah to resign from Twitter.

Noah faced with no other choice and no one in his corner, Noah resigned.

Noah was trying desperately to sift ideas out of the employees to save the company. Jack mentioned his “status” concept. 

In a small snippet of text, people could note if they were available, in a meeting, or just busy, so their online friends knew their whereabouts. 

It was about co...

“What are other use cases?” Dom asked. “My mom could use it too,” Jack said, so she could see what he was up to. 

On March 21, 2006, at 11: 50 A.M., Jack tweeted, “just setting up my twttr,” 

  “Oh this is going to be addictive,” Dom wrote. “Wishing I had another sammich,” Biz wrote. ...

But Biz was genuinely confused. “I don’t understand how they can just throw away this guy’s entire career,” “Don’t these people (investors) have feelings?” Although Biz was a cofounder of Twitter, he had never really had much power at the company. He had never understood what drove the “money guy...

By 2013, with a net worth of a billion dollars, it might seem like Jack had “won.” But to some of the people who knew him when he arrived at Odeo eight years earlier, it seemed quite the opposite. Back then he had joined the company as a quiet young programmer in search of friendships and a mento...

Biz was starting to grow frustrated , as Jack would often tell people in these interviews that he was the “inventor” of Twitter; the sole creator of an idea that actually had many creators. 

 “But I invented Twitter,” Jack said. “No, you didn’t invent Twitter,” Ev replied. “I didn’t invent ...

Jack had been behind it all. Moving chess pieces, ten moves ahead. This was Jack’s revenge. 

Like Jack two years earlier and Noah two years before that, Ev was officially out of a job at Twitter. And like his two cofounders, he was completely powerless to do anything about it. 

Like J...

April 2008 Jack fired Blaine in an attempt to show Ev his control of the company. 

Blaine had been the core programmer of Twitter, and without him Jack had no idea how to fix certain issues.  

Ev pulling on one end, Jack on the other, Biz trying his best not to get caught in the midd...

Jack had the germ of the idea, of people sharing their status,

Noah’s vision of a service that could connect people who felt alone, and a name that people would remember, Twitter,

Ev’s financial support and Silicon Valley fame,

Biz’s ethical stance on protecting and standing ...

Ev released the diary Web site to the world. He called it Blogger, a word that had not existed until then. He believed it would allow people without any computer-programming knowledge to create a Web log, or blog. 

He had a vision for Blogger, where anyone could have their own blog, the equ...

There was one person who was not Jack’s biggest fan: Ev. He believed Jack didn’t work hard enough. Wasn’t in the office enough. Was distracted by his hobbies. 

Jack had also started a new ritual called Tea Time: a weekly event for Twitter staff that was held on a Friday afternoon to discuss...

“Campbell is the real deal,” “He’s coached Eric Schmidt, Larry and Sergey, and Steve Jobs. He’s a fucking legend.” Ev agreed to the meeting. 

What’s the worst thing I can do as CEO to fuck the company up?” Without skipping a beat, Campbell responded: “Hire your fucking friends!” 

Ev a...

 Jack had also made one of the most important decisions for Twitter to date: limiting the length of tweets. “We’re going to standardize this at 140 characters. 

Ev dictated that Jack would be CEO. Biz, Jack, and Ev would be cofounders. Goldman would be the vice president of product. 

Campbell said “The board doesn’t wasn’t you to be CEO. They want you to step down. They want you out.” 

He explained, the company needed a new type of CEO who could focus on revenue and take Twitter public. 

Ev had no idea whom to trust. How long ago had the board decided to fire him?...

Ev took a deep breath and replied. “Yes. I want to be CEO. I have experience running a company, and that’s what Twitter needs right now.” 

“Jack’s out,” he said. “The board met. This is the final decision. They want me to be CEO, and Jack will become chairman,”

Ev was the majority sh...

As the media’s Next Steve Jobs, jack was too big and too powerful for anyone to dent his version of history that had appeared in thousands of press outlets. He started spending more time with celebrities. 

Biz was the last cofounder to leave. On June 28, 2011, he announced that he was leavi...

Ev sat down with his wife and they asked each other the following questions: How can we raise our children to never act this way? How can we raise them to be honest and caring? They came up with two solutions.

First, When his kids grow up, they will be responsible for giving it away to char...

Jack had another side project too: REVENGE. Unlike Noah, who was doing his best to forget and forgive the betrayal by his friends, Jack ran in the opposite direction, unable to flush the resentment he felt toward Ev, the board, and now Biz too, out of his mind. 

Each time he read an article...

Jack experimented with Jobs’s round glasses and cloned the mantra of a daily uniform.

He copied many of Jobs’s decisions.

Jack heard that Jobs didn’t consider himself a CEO but rather an “editor.”

Soon Jack started referring to himself as “the editor, not just the CEO” of Squar...

All of the early employees and Odeo investors we talked to also agree that no one at Odeo was more passionate about Twitter in the early days than Odeo’s cofounder, Noah Glass.

“Some people have gotten credit, some people haven’t. The reality is it was a group effort. I didn’t create Twitte...

Ev set off to Hawaii with his family— a vacation. While away, sitting by the pool, thinking about the psychological trauma of the past several months, he realized he didn’t really have a role at Twitter after all. He had been fired without being escorted out of the building. 

After discussi...

Biz bank account, which once began with a negative symbol, now ends with seven zeros. When people ask Biz about his wealth, he tells them that money rarely changes people; it often just magnifies who they really are. The majority of the money Biz make goes to the Biz and Livia Stone Foundation (a...

“Twitter was originally conceived as a mobile status update service— an easy way to keep in touch with people in your life by sending and receiving short, frequent answers to one question, ‘What’s happening?’

The perfect equilibrium of two different ways of looking at the world:

"The ...