Here's everything that's happened to Twitter since Elon Musk bought it and renamed it X

Musk officially acquires Twitter.

The billionaire immediately ousted a number of its executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, and senior legal counsel Sean Edgett.

After Musk's first all-hands meeting with Twitter staff, many learned that Yoel Roth, the head of trust and safety, had resigned. Robin Wheeler, who was previously the advertising sales leader, also resigned but was convinced to stay. She has since left the company.

Along with the acquisition, Musk also took Twitter private. It was officially delisted from the New York Stock Exchange in November 2022. The move gave Musk complete control, freeing him to make changes without any boards or meddling shareholders to restrain him.

Cofounder Jack Dorsey agreed to roll over his 2.4% stake to Musk's holding company, X Holdings I Inc.

Musk starts to lay off staff.

Musk's first round of Twitter layoffs on November 4 saw hundreds of employees let go. A week after taking the helm, Musk sent employees an email confirming rumors that layoffs were imminent.

The memo said they would find out the next day if their roles had been affected by the cuts. However, some staff received notice they'd lost their job that same evening. Some Twitter employees lost access to their email accounts and company systems that night.

The following week, Musk issued remaining employees an ultimatum: work at an "extremely hardcore" rate to build "Twitter 2.0" or accept a three-month severance package. Musk sent employees an email at midnight PT on Wednesday, a timestamp on the email seen by Business Insider showed. The self-described "chief Twit" said in the email that employees were expected to work "long hours at high intensity."

Musk fired several dozen Twitter employees the night before Thanksgiving, despite saying in an all-hands meeting the week before that there would be no more layoffs.

Musk also gave more details on the coming changes to Twitter's verification model. He tweeted that Twitter's "lords & peasants system for who has or doesn't have a blue checkmark is bullshit." He added: "Power to the people! Blue for $8/month."

After Musk launched the Twitter Blue subscription, it led to a wave of bizarre and comical impersonations of public figures and brands. Some users couldn't distinguish whether it was an official account belonging to public figures, brands, or impersonators.

Musk says expenses are "reasonably under control" after saying in November that a Twitter bankruptcy was a possibility.

Dozens of unused offices in Twitter's San Francisco HQ were turned into bedrooms in December for Musk's confidants. San Francisco officials later said the city was investigating and ordered Twitter to label them as sleeping areas or convert them back.

Musk cuts a major fertility benefit for Twitter employees. Staff were emailed that the benefit, which covers up to $80,000 in fertility-related costs, would be halved.

Twitter offices in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Mexico, and Africa started shutting down in a bid to cut costs.

Musk announces that Twitter API access will no longer be free, revealing plans to start charging $100 a month for the basic tier of the API in a bid to weed out bots.

The next month, Twitter rolled out tiered access to its API, charging different amounts depending on the user.

Twitter announces it will sunset its legacy blue-tick verified program — which Musk earlier called "deeply corrupted."

Before Musk's acquisition, Twitter gave blue checkmarks to authenticate active accounts of "public interest" such as those belonging to politicians, public figures, celebrities, and journalists. The platform independently verified such accounts.

Musk named Linda Yaccarino Twitter's new CEO.

He tweeted: "@LindaYacc will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology. Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app."

Twitter announced that companies sharing information as a public service will be able to start using Twitter's API for free again.

As of May 2023, Twitter had about 1,000 full-time employees, down from around 7,500 when Musk first took over.

Meta launches Threads, a new text-based social-media network, in July.

That same night, Musk's lawyer sent the company a cease-and-desist letter saying it was a "copycat" app. The letter said Meta hired "dozens of former Twitter employees" to help build the rival app. It also said Meta had been "crawling and scraping" Twitter data.

Musk also announces he will rename the company "X," with plans to make it an "everything app." Soon after, he scraps Twitter's bird logo in favor of a monochrome X and installs a giant X sign on its San Francisco headquarters. The sign was removed three days later after complaints rolled in.

Musk lays off employees on the trust and safety team. The roles involved keeping the platform safe for advertisers and users.

An EU Commission report, meanwhile, finds X had the highest amount of Russian disinformation out of the major social media platforms. It called for Musk to ramp up efforts to tackle disinformation. The European Commission's vice-president, Vera Jourova, advised Twitter that "we are watching what you are doing."

The SEC says it is investigating Musk's acquisition of Twitter and asks a California federal court to force him to comply with a May subpoena to sit for testimony.

The filing revealed what the agency said has been "an ongoing nonpublic investigation by the SEC regarding whether, among other things, Musk violated various provisions of the federal securities laws" with his initial secret collection of Twitter stock in early 2022 and his later purchase of the company, along with statements he made about the deal.

Data provided exclusively to Business Insider's Lara O'Reilly by the marketing consultancy Ebiquity showed that a large majority of X's biggest-spending advertisers had stopped advertising on the platform since Musk acquired the company.

Just two of Ebiquity clients, which account for 70 of the top 100 top-spending advertisers, had purchased ads on X in September, down from 31 brands 12 months earlier.

Musk also announces the launch of two new tiers of the X premium subscription service.

"One is lower cost with all features, but no reduction in ads, and the other is more expensive, but has no ads," he said in a post on X.

Musk first runs afoul of Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.

De Moraes asked X to remove over 100 accounts flagged as misinformation, hate speech, or attacks on democracy. The platform initially agreed, but Musk posted to X later that same day, saying the platform would not impose restrictions.

Musk called the order "aggressive censorship" and told his 202 million followers that X would lift all restrictions.

"We are lifting all restrictions. This judge has applied massive fines, threatened to arrest our employees and cut off access to X in Brazil," Musk wrote. "As a result, we will probably lose all revenue in Brazil and have to shut down our office there. But principles matter more than profit."

De Moraes then opened an investigation into Musk for obstruction of justice and imposed a fine of about $20,000 each time X reactivated an account.

Musk and de Moraes found themselves in a stand-off.

X's Global Government Affairs account said Musk closed the company's Brazil-based offices on August 17 after de Moraes "threatened our legal representative in Brazil with arrest if we do not comply with his censorship orders."

De Moraes upped the ante on August 30 when he officially barred X in Brazil. The ban prompted a surge in VPN demand despite de Moraes threatening to fine people nearly $9,000 a day for using workarounds to access X.

The repercussions were also felt at Musk's SpaceX, which operates a satellite internet system called Starlink. Starlink's bank accounts were frozen in Brazil on August 29 to help pay X's fines since the companies were both owned by Musk.

"This order is based on an unfounded determination that Starlink should be responsible for the fines levied — unconstitutionally —against X," Starlink said in an X post.

Musk also responded on X, saying SpaceX and Starlink were separate companies with different shareholders, so the decision "improperly punishes other shareholders and the people of Brazil."

The tension finally ended in late September when X quietly agreed to comply with the orders from Brazil's Supreme Court. X paid a $5.2 million fine and blocked flagged accounts. Brazilian X users regained access to the platform in early October.

Musk implements another change he had long been musing about: X users' "likes" would be made private.

Users used to be able to see all the tweets or posts that other users liked, but Musk said he wanted people to like posts without being "attacked" for doing so.

Musk officially endorses Trump after the former president survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania in July.

The Tesla founder then went all in, donating $75 million to a pro-Trump super PAC between July 1 and September 30. By late October, Business Insider reported that Musk spent over $130 million on Trump and the GOP this year.

Musk's support for Trump extended onto X, where he's made posts amplifying GOP talking points and criticizing Democrats.

Musk hosted a Spaces conversation with Trump in August, but technical difficulties marred the event. After a second apparent assassination attempt on Trump in September, Musk questioned why no one was "even trying to assassinate" President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Musk later deleted that post from his X account and tried to quell backlash by calling it a joke. Still, his remarks caused the Secret Service to launch an investigation.

The company discloses a list of X's investors after a federal judge ordered X to unseal a list of shareholders.

Names included X founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al Saud, rapper Sean "Diddy" Combs, and Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity, and Sequoia.

X also files a lawsuit against a group of advertisers, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by organizing an advertising boycott against the social network.

CEO Linda Yaccarino posted a video and an open letter announcing the lawsuit against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, the World Federation of Advertisers, and the GARM members CVS Health, Mars, Orsted, and Unilever.

Lawyers for X argued in the lawsuit that GARM persuaded top brands not to advertise on X in an effort to "collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue" from the platform.

Musk unveils the Grok chatbot for all X users.

Musk first launched his AI company, xAI, in 2023, which designed a large language model called Grok.

Grok is Musk's entry into the global AI race, which includes companies like Sam Altman's OpenAI and Dario Amodei's Anthropic. Musk positioned Grok as an alternative to what he considers liberal-leaning chatbots like ChatGPT, which he said on X has "woke programmed into its bones."

So far, there are four iterations of Grok.

Musk announces that xAI has acquired X in an all-stock deal.

"The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B debt)," Musk wrote on X.

He added that xAI and X's "futures are intertwined."

"This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI's advanced AI capability and expertise with X's massive reach," Musk wrote. "The combined company will deliver smarter, more meaningful experiences to billions of people while staying true to our core mission of seeking truth and advancing knowledge."

Musk says X's new DM feature — XChat — has begun "rolling out".

"All new XChat is rolling out with encryption, vanishing messages and the ability to send any kind of file. Also, audio/video calling," Musk said in an X post. "This is built on Rust with (Bitcoin style) encryption, whole new architecture."

Grok 3 posts antisemitic remarks on X, sparking criticism from xAI workers and X users.

In the now-deleted posts, Grok praised Adolf Hitler's leadership, made a joke about Jewish people's noses, and associated Ashkenazi surnames with "anti-white hate."

Grok's official X account posted an apology for the rant, calling it "horrific behavior" and blaming a recent update for the incident.

"After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot," the X post said. "This is independent of the underlying language model that powers @grok. The update was active for 16 hrs, in which deprecated code made @grok susceptible to existing X user posts; including when such posts contained extremist views."

Before Grok made the posts, xAI added new lines to Grok 3's public systems prompts that told the chatbot to view media viewpoints as biased and to consider "politically incorrect" statements, "as long as they are well substantiated."

The posts came days before xAI debuted the chatbot's latest version, Grok 4.

The official X account for Community Notes introduces the AI Note Writer API.

"Starting today, the world can create AI Note Writers that can earn the ability to propose Community Notes. Their notes will show on X if found helpful by people from different perspectives — just like all notes," the post said.

The post said the pilot program kicked off that month and would expand over time.

"Not only does this have the potential to accelerate the speed and scale of Community Notes, rating feedback from the community can help develop AI agents that deliver increasingly accurate, less biased, and broadly helpful information — a powerful feedback loop," the post said.

Yaccarino also stepped down as CEO after two years in the role.

"I'm incredibly proud of the X team - the historic business turn around we have accomplished together has been nothing short of remarkable," she wrote on X.

Musk thanked Yaccarino for her contributions in a separate X post. X hasn't announced her replacement yet.

Musk unveils Grok Imagine, the chatbot's image generator.

In typical Musk fashion, the image generator has few guardrails, allowing users to create all kinds of content, NSFW and otherwise. It includes a "spicy mode" that allows the creation of sexually explicit images.

The generator creates images in seconds from a text prompt and is available on the X platform.