A decade ago, Twitter’s future was looking bright. The company was benefiting from a flood of funding into the social-networking space, eventually leading to an IPO in 2013 that raised $1.8 billion.

Now the company is back in private hands. And they happen to be the hands of Elon Musk, the richest person in the world and one of the app’s most high-profile provocateurs.

It’s a massive moment. Twitter has become a key place for people to debate, joke and pontificate in their own circles of politics, sports, tech and finance. It’s also served as a platform that gives voice to the voiceless, helping protesters organize and express themselves in repressed regimes around the world.

In recent years, however, Twitter and social media rivals like Facebook have been at the center of controversy over the distribution of fake news and misinformation, sometimes leading to bullying and violence.

Investors had grown concerned about Twitter as a business. The company was generally unprofitable, struggled to keep pace with Google and Facebook, and often killed popular products with no real explanation.

What follows is a brief history of Twitter, which — despite its many flaws — is one of the most iconic companies to come out of Silicon Valley in the past 20 years.

2006

In March, Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams created Twitter, which was originally a side project stemming from the podcasting tool Odeo. That month, Dorsey would send the first Tweet that read, “just setting up my twttr.”

2007

In July, Twitter received a $100,000 Series A funding round led by Union Square Ventures. The app’s popularity started to explode after being heavily promoted by the tech community during the annual South by Southwest conference.

2008

Dorsey stepped down as CEO in October, and was replaced by Williams. According to the book “Hatching Twitter” by journalist Nick Bilton, Twitter’s board fired Dorsey over concerns about the executive’s management style and public boastings.

2009

Twitter’s popularity continued to soar, leading to a high-profile appearance from Williams on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show alongside celebrity Ashton Kutcher. Kutcher would also write about Williams and Stone as part of Time Magazine’s Time 100 issue. Twitter was now a mainstream phenomenon.

2010

Twitter reached space, with NASA Astronaut Timothy Creamer sending the first tweet live from outer orbit. Behind the scenes, however, management woes continued with Williams stepping down as CEO, replaced by operating chief Dick Costolo.

2011

Twitter became an essential social media tool used during the Arab Spring, the wave of antigovernmental protests throughout Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. Protesters used the site to post reports and to organize. As the Pew Research Center noted, Twitter’s role in “disseminating breaking news” was not “not limited to the Arab uprisings – the death of Whitney Houston, for example, was announced on Twitter 55 minutes prior to the AP confirming the story.”

2012

Twitter’s reach expanded to 200 million active users. Barack Obama used the “platform to first declare victory publicly in the 2012 U.S. presidential election, with a Tweet that was viewed approximately 25 million times on our platform and widely distributed offline in print and broadcast media,” according to corporate filings.

2013

Twitter went public in November. The combined wealth of Williams, Dorsey, and Costolo hit roughly $4 billion.

“I think we’ve got a tremendous set of thoughts and strategies to increase the slope of the growth curve,” Costolo told CNBC at the time. “I would consider some of them tactics, some of them broader strategies, in service of doing what I referred to as bridge the gap between the massive awareness of Twitter and deep engagement of the platform.”

2014

Slowing user growth led to several stock drops and analyst downgrades. Twitter also deemed 2014 the year of the “selfie.”

2015

Compared to rivals like Google, Facebook, and even LinkedIn, Twitter was starting to look like the runt of the Internet litter. Twitter was still unprofitable as its ad business struggled mightily against its larger competitors. Dorsey would also return as CEO of the company, while still maintaining the top job at his other company, Square (now Block).

2016

Rumors began circulating that Twitter was looking to be acquired, with Salesforce as a potential suitor. Meanwhile, Twitter and Facebook were criticized for their role in letting prominent users like Donald Trump, who would win the U.S. presidential election that year, spread misleading information without consequence.

“Having the president-elect on our service using it as a direct line of communication allows everyone to see what is on his mind in the moment,” Dorsey said at the time. “We’re definitely entering a new world where everything is on the surface and we can all see that in real time and we can have conversations about it.”

2017

For a moment, Twitter appeared to be on the upswing. Its stock was finally trending upward as the company’s finances were improving. Meanwhile, Trump as president continued to use Twitter as his megaphone. According to Twitter’s own data, “Trump was the most-tweeted-about global leader in the world and in the United States” that year, CNBC reported.

2018

Dorsey and Facebook’s then-operating chief Sheryl Sandberg testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee about alleged interference by Russia-linked actors in the 2016 election. Trump and fellow Republicans became increasingly vocal about alleged political bias by Twitter and other social media sites.

“In fact, from a simple business perspective and to serve the public conversation, Twitter is incentivized to keep all voices on the platform,” Dorsey said at the time.

2019

Analysts found correlations between President Trump’s voracious use of Twitter and various markets, including gold, underscoring the cultural power of Twitter. Trump met with Dorsey — a Twitter spokesperson said “Jack had a constructive meeting with the President of the United States today at the president’s invitation.”

“They discussed Twitter’s commitment to protecting the health of the public conversation ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections and efforts underway to respond to the opioid crisis,” the spokesperson said.

2020

As Covid-19 spread across the globe, the spread of misinformation dominated the online conversation. And Twitter continued to struggle to grow its business. The service was also hacked that year, and miscreants gained access to over a dozen high-profile accounts, including those controlled by Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos, and Musk

2021

Twitter permanently banned Trump over inflammatory comments the president made during the U.S. Capitol riots in January that the company said could lead to “further incitement of violence.” Trump would allege that Twitter workers “coordinated with the Democrats and the Radical Left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me.” Later, Dorsey suddenly stepped down as CEO and was replaced by Parag Agrawal, the company’s chief technology officer.

2022

Musk took over Twitter after a protracted legal spat that would have culminated this week in a trial in Delaware’s Court of Chancery. The Tesla CEO agreed in April to pay $44 billion for Twitter, but then attempted to renege on the deal. He changed course and opted to proceed, walking into the company’s San Francisco office on Wednesday with what appeared to be a porcelain bathroom sink in his hands.

“Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!” he tweeted, with a video of his entrance.

Musk immediately began making changes, firing Agrawal, finance head Ned Segal, and head of legal policy Vijaya Gadde.

WATCH: Billionaire Elon Musk steps into Twitter HQ, sink in hand

Apple recently updated its App Store Guidelines with changes that, yet again, impact Facebook’s ad business.

The new rule, introduced Monday, says that companies like Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, can offer apps that allow people to buy and manage advertising campaigns in dedicated apps without using Apple’s payment system, but it considers buying an ad in a social media app to be a digital purchase, from which Apple takes a 30% cut.

Meta wasn’t happy with the change. A Meta spokesperson told CNBC, “Apple continues to evolve its policies to grow their own business while undercutting others in the digital economy.”

The episode is the latest skirmish from companies like Meta that feel that Apple has too much power over mobile distribution and the ever expanding and changing rules of Apple’s App Store, which is the only way to install apps on an iPhone.

Meta and Apple have been battling for years, but the rivalry has grown more heated recently after Apple introduced App Tracking Transparency in the iPhone operating system last year. The privacy feature allows users to decline to offer app developers like Meta a unique device ID that can be used to track ad performance. Meta says the change could cost it $10 billion this year.

Meta and Apple also appear poised to compete in the world of consumer hardware, after Meta released the Quest Pro headset and Apple has been developing a competing VR headset for years that could reportedly launch next year.

Apple told CNBC that even before the new guideline the company considered social boosts to be the kind of digital purchase that needed to use Apple in-app purchases, and that the rule is more of a clarification than a new restriction.

“For many years now, the App Store guidelines have been clear that the sale of digital goods and services within an app must use In-App Purchase,” an Apple spokesman told CNBC. “Boosting, which allows an individual or organization to pay to increase the reach of a post or profile, is a digital service — so of course In-App Purchase is required. This has always been the case and there are many examples of apps that do it successfully.”

This individual restriction has long been a sticking point, and Meta, back when it was still named Facebook, negotiated with Apple over social media boosts and whether they would fall under Apple’s digital purchase rules, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Boosting features are offered by several social media companies. But most, like Twitter, already use Apple’s in-app purchase mechanism that lists boosted posts for $9.99 on Apple’s App Store. TikTok sells coins, or a currency used to promote posts, through in-app purchases as well.

For Meta, it thinks Apple’s recent clarification crosses a line in taking a piece of advertising revenue, not just app sales. Meta points to previous Apple executive statements, some made as part of the Epic Games trial over App Store rules, where it said it didn’t take a cut of ads.

“Apple previously said it didn’t take a share of developer advertising revenue, and now apparently changed its mind. We remain committed to offering small businesses simple ways to run ads and grow their businesses on our apps,” the Meta spokesperson told CNBC.

Apple isn’t asking for a cut of every ad served through the Facebook or Instagram apps. But Meta clearly feels targeted by Apple’s increasing power over its platforms, and worries that the company could argue that it deserves a piece of Meta’s total ad sales through its ads manager app, according to The Verge, which first reported Meta’s complaint.

It’s unclear how big the boost market is. Most big advertisers use dedicated portals or apps to buy ads. Eric Seufert, an ads industry watcher and the founder of Mobile Dev Memo, wrote Monday that he suspects it is a “negligible proportion of revenue” to the social media companies.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk sent Twitter shares tumbling on Friday when he said he was going to put his $44 billion acquisition of the social network “on hold” while he researches the proportion of fake and spam accounts on the platform.

Though Musk later clarified that he remains committed to the deal, he continued to hammer on the issue of fake accounts. He wrote, on Twitter, that his team would do their own analysis and expressed doubt about the accuracy of numbers Twitter has reported in its most recent financial filings.

In its first-quarter earnings report this year, Twitter acknowledged there are a number of “false or spam accounts” on its platform, alongside legitimate monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU). The company reported, “We have performed an internal review of a sample of accounts and estimate that the average of false or spam accounts during the first quarter of 2022 represented fewer than 5% of our mDAU during the quarter.”

Twitter also admitted to overstating user numbers by 1.4 million to 1.9 million users over the past 3 years. The company wrote, “In March of 2019, we launched a feature that allowed people to link multiple separate accounts together in order to conveniently switch between accounts,” Twitter disclosed. “An error was made at that time, such that actions taken via the primary account resulted in all linked accounts being counted as mDAU.”

While Musk may be justifiably curious, experts in social media, disinformation and statistical analysis say that his suggested approach to further analysis is woefully deficient.

Here’s what the SpaceX and Tesla CEO said he would do to determine how many spam, fake and duplicate accounts exist on Twitter:

“To find out, my team will do a random sample of 100 followers of @twitter. I invite others to repeat the same process and see what they discover.” He clarified his methodology in subsequent tweets, adding: “Pick any account with a lot of followers,” and “Ignore first 1000 followers, then pick every 10th. I’m open to better ideas.”

Musk also said, without providing evidence, that he picked 100 as the sample size number for his study because that’s the number Twitter uses to calculate the numbers in their earnings reports.

“Any sensible random sampling process is fine. If many people independently get similar results for % of fake/spam/duplicate accounts, that will be telling. I picked 100 as the sample size number, because that is what Twitter uses to calculate <5% fake/spam/duplicate.”

Twitter declined to comment when asked if his description of its methodology was accurate.

Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz weighed-in on the issue via his own Twitter account, pointing out that Musk’s approach is not actually random, uses a too small sample, and leaves room for massive errors.

He wrote, “Also I feel like ‘doesn’t trust the Twitter team to help pull the sample’ is it’s own kind of red flag.”

BotSentinel founder and CEO Christopher Bouzy said in an interview with CNBC that analysis by his company indicates that 10% to 15% of accounts on Twitter are likely “inauthentic,” including fakes, spammers, scammers, nefarious bots, duplicates, and “single-purpose hate accounts” which typically target and harass individuals, along with others who spread disinformation on purpose.

BotSentinel, which is primarily supported through crowdfunding, independently analyzes and identifies inauthentic activity on Twitter using a mix of machine learning software and teams of human reviewers. The company monitors more than 2.5 million Twitter accounts today, primarily English-language users.

“I think Twitter is not realistically classifying ‘false and spam’ accounts,” Bouzy said.

He also warns that the number of inauthentic accounts can appear higher or lower in different corners of Twitter depending on topics being discussed. For example, more inauthentic accounts tweet about politics, cryptocurrency, climate change, and covid than those discussing non-controversial topics like kittens and origami, BotSentinel has found.

Carl T. Bergstrom, a University of Washington professor who co-wrote a book to help people understand data and avoid being taken in by false claims online, told CNBC that sampling one hundred followers of any single Twitter account should not serve as “due diligence” for making a $44 billion acquisition.

He said that a sample size of 100 is orders of magnitude smaller that the norm for social media researchers studying this sort of thing. The biggest issue Musk would face with this approach is known as selection bias.

Bergstrom wrote in a message to CNBC, “There’s no reason to believe that followers of the official Twitter account are a representative sample of accounts on the platform. Perhaps bots are less likely to follow this account to avoid detection. Perhaps they’re more likely to follow to seem legitimate. Who knows? But I just can’t fathom that Musk is doing anything other than trolling us with this silly sampling scheme.”

Twitter just reported earnings for the first quarter of 2022, in what could be one of its last reports as a public company after its board agreed to sell to Elon Musk for $44 billion.

Here are the key numbers:

Earnings per share: 4 cents, adjusted vs 3 cents expected, according to a Refinitiv survey of analystsRevenue: $1.2 billion vs $1.23 billion expected, according to RefinitivMonetizable Daily Active Users (mDAUs): 229 million vs 226.9 million expected, according to StreetAccount

Shares of Twitter up about 1.8% Thursday afternoon.

Twitter missed analyst revenue estimates, reporting 1.2 billion versus the 1.23 billion analysts were expecting, according to Refinitiv. But it beat estimates for earnings per share, at 4 cents, adjusted compared to 3 cents expected.

The company said the 229 million mDAUs it reported in the quarter represents a 15.9% increase from the same period last year. In the U.S. mDAUs were up 6.4% from the prior year’s quarter, at 39.6 million. International mDAUs came in at 189.4 million, up 18.1% from the year before.

It also corrected previously reported mDAU numbers that overcounted some accounts from Q1 2019 through Q4 2021. Twitter said the error, which incorrectly reported roughly 1.4 million to 1.9 million extra mDAUs per quarter during that period, was made after launching a feature allowing users to easily switch between their separate accounts. As a result, the company said that during that period, all linked accounts were counted as mDAUs when an action was made by the primary account.

Before the deal was formally announced on Monday, some analysts speculated that Twitter might have wanted to finalize the deal before reporting earnings this weak, anticipating a disappointing quarter.

Snap reported last week that its revenue was impacted by macroeconomic trends weighing on advertisers, which could similarly affect Twitter.

Though it could still take months for Musk’s deal to buy Twitter to close, the company canceled its usual earnings conference call in light of Monday’s acquisition news. It expects the deal to close this year.

Twitter also said it would not provide forward-looking guidance and is withdrawing earlier goals and outlook it has provided.

Musk has signaled he’d like to use his ownership to make Twitter a more open platform, both through transparency in its algorithms and processes and in being more tolerant of different views.

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WATCH: Less content moderation means more brand safety issues for Twitter, says JMP’s Boone

In a court filing out late Friday, shareholders who are suing Tesla and CEO Elon Musk over alleged securities fraud said they won part of a critical ruling in their class-action lawsuit.

The shareholders are suing Tesla over money they lost after Musk tweeted in 2018 that he was considering taking his electric vehicle company private at $420 per share and said he had funding secured to do so.

Tesla’s stock trading initially halted, then shares were highly volatile for weeks after the tweets. Musk later said that he had been in discussions with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and felt confident that funding would come through at his proposed price. A deal never materialized.

The Securities and Exchange Commission investigated and charged Musk with civil securities fraud as a result of those tweets. Tesla and Musk struck a revised settlement agreement in 2019 over those charges, but Musk is trying to terminate that agreement now.

Damages from the shareholders’ class-action lawsuit could amount to billions of dollars that would be paid by Musk and Tesla to those who are members of the class.

The shareholders’ attorneys said in the filing out Friday that Judge Edward M. Chen, who is presiding in this matter, had concluded that Musk acted with scienter — in other words, that he knowingly made false statements about having funding secured when he tweeted.

This information was revealed in a request the shareholders’ lawyers made for a temporary restraining order against Musk to stop him from making further public remarks about aspects of this case, as he did during a widely viewed appearance at the TED 2022 conference on April 14.

The request for the temporary restraining order alludes to an earlier ruling by Judge Chen that is currently under seal because it refers to evidence that Musk’s team regarded as confidential. “We anticipate the order will be published soon,” Adam Apton of Levi & Korsinsky, lead counsel for the class of Tesla shareholders, told CNBC by email.

At the TED conference on Thursday, Musk called financial regulators in the SEC’s San Francisco office “bastards.”

Musk also said, “The SEC knew that funding was secured but they pursued an active, public investigation nonetheless at the time. Tesla was in a precarious financial situation. And I was told by the banks that if I did not agree to settle with the SEC that they would, the banks would cease providing working capital and Tesla would go bankrupt immediately. So that’s like having a gun to your child’s head. I was forced to concede to the SEC unlawfully.”

It’s not clear why Musk felt he may have been unable to obtain working capital for Tesla, but confident he could muster the billions required to take the company private at the same time.

Musk is currently the richest person in the world on paper, and is trying to acquire Twitter, his social media platform of choice, and take it private for around $43 billion.

Musk’s attorney Alex Spiro, a partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, said in a statement emailed to CNBC: “Nothing will ever change the truth which is that Elon Musk was considering taking Tesla private and could have – all that’s left some half decade later is random plaintiffs’ lawyers trying to make a buck and others trying to block that truth from coming to light all to the detriment of free speech.” 

Spiro gave the same statement to Bloomberg, which first reported on new developments in the shareholders’ class action.

A trial date is currently set for May 31, 2022, in a San Francisco federal court, but that could change.

Levi & Korsinsky’s Apton told CNBC, “We look forward to proving the rest of our case at trial and recovering damages on behalf of the class.”

Stock futures slipped in early morning trading Tuesday after investors bought the dip in technology shares following recent weakness.

Futures on the Dow Jones Industrial Average traded 60 points lower, or 0.2%. S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq 100 futures were down 0.2% each.

Those moves come after a tech-led rally that saw the Nasdaq Composite rise 1.9%. Shares of Twitter surged 27% for its best day ever after Elon Musk disclosed a 9.2% passive stake in the social media company.

The blue-chip Dow rose about 100 points to begin the trading week, while the S&P 500 advanced 0.8%, both posting their second straight day of gains.

“In the near-term, we believe indiscriminate selling has created attractive entry points, particularly into some high-growth-potential stocks,” Tony DeSpirito, CIO of U.S. fundamental equities at BlackRock, said in a note.

The new quarter has kicked off after the major averages finished their worst quarter in two years. Investors are awaiting the Federal Reserve meeting minutes Wednesday for further clues on the central bank’s rate-hike path. Meanwhile, the first-quarter corporate earnings season is set to begin next week.

“Markets have been resilient given the war in Ukraine, continued price pressures, and uncertain global economic outlook, with investors’ ‘buy the dip’ mentality driving equity returns,” said Mark Hackett, Nationwide’s chief of investment research.

Investors are also keeping an eye on oil prices amid the supply disruptions stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. West Texas Intermediate futures rose 1.1% on Tuesday to $104.39 per barrel.

More than three weeks ago, a popular Twitter account named “Anonymous” declared that the shadowy activist group was waging a “cyber war” against Russia.

Since then, the account — which has more than 7.9 million followers, with some 500,000 gained since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — has claimed responsibility for disabling prominent Russian government, news and corporate websites and leaking data from entities such as Roskomnadzor, the federal agency responsible for censoring Russian media.

But is any of that true?

It appears it is, says Jeremiah Fowler, a co-founder of the cybersecurity company Security Discovery, who worked with researchers at the web company Website Planet to attempt to verify the group’s claims.

“Anonymous has proven to be a very capable group that has penetrated some high value targets, records and databases in the Russian Federation,” he wrote in a report summarizing the findings.  

Of 100 Russian databases that were analyzed, 92 had been compromised, said Fowler.

They belonged to retailers, Russian internet providers and intergovernmental websites, including the Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS, an organization made up of Russia and other former Soviet nations that was created in 1991 following the fall of the Soviet Union.

Many CIS files were erased, hundreds of folders were renamed to “putin_stop_this_war” and email addresses and administrative credentials were exposed, said Fowler, who likened it to 2020’s malicious “MeowBot” attacks, which “had no purpose except for a malicious script that wiped out data and renamed all the files.”

Another hacked database contained more than 270,000 names and email addresses.

“We know for a fact that hackers found and probably accessed these systems,” said Fowler. “We do not know if data was downloaded or what the hackers plan to do with this information.”

Other databases contained security information, internal passwords and a “very large number” of secret keys, which unlock encrypted data, said Fowler.

As to whether this was the work of Anonymous, Fowler said he followed Anonymous’ claims “and the timeline matches perfect,” he said.

The Twitter account, named @YourAnonNews, has also claimed to have hacked into Russian state TV stations.

“I would mark that as true if I were a factchecker,” said Fowler. “My partner at Security Discovery, Bob Diachenko, actually captured a state news live feed from a website and filmed the screen, so we were able to validate that they had hacked at least one live feed [with] a pro-Ukrainian message in Russian.”

The account has also claimed to have disrupted websites of major Russian organizations and media agencies, such as the energy company Gazprom and state-sponsored news agency RT.

“Many of these agencies have admitted that they were attacked,” said Fowler.

He called denial of service attacks — which aim to disable websites by flooding them with traffic — “super easy.” Those websites, and many others, have been shuttered at various points in recent weeks, but they are also reportedly being targeted by other groups as well, including some 310,000 digital volunteers who have signed up for the “IT Army of Ukraine” Telegram account.   

Fowler said he didn’t find any instances where Anonymous had overstated its claims.

But that is happening with other hacktivist groups, said Lotem Finkelstein, head of threat intelligence and research at the cybersecurity company Check Point Software Technologies.

In recent weeks, a pro-Ukrainian group claimed it breached a Russian nuclear reactor, and a pro-Russian group said it shut down Anonymous’ website. Check Point concluded both claims were false.

“As there is no real official Anonymous website, this attack … appears to be more of a morale booster for the pro-Russian side, and a publicity event,” CPR said, a fact which did not go unnoticed by Anonymous affiliates, who mocked the claim on social media. 

Groups are making fake claims by posting old or publicly available information to gain popularity or glory, said Finkelstein.

Fowler said he feels Anonymous is, however, dedicated more to the “cause” than to notoriety.

“In what I saw in these databases, it was more about the messaging than saying ‘hey, you know, Anonymous troop No. 21, group five, did this,'” he said. “It was more about the end result.”

Hacktivists who conduct offensive cyber warfare-like activities without government authority are engaging in criminal acts, said Paul de Souza, the founder of the non-profit Cyber Security Forum Initiative.

Despite this, many social media users are cheering Anonymous’ efforts on, with many posts receiving thousands of likes and messages of support.

“They’re almost like a cyber Robin Hood, when it comes to causes that people really care about, that no one else can really do anything about,” said Fowler. “You want action now, you want justice now, and I think groups like Anonymous and hacktivists give people that immediate satisfaction.”

Many hacktivist groups have strong values, said Marianne Bailey, a cybersecurity partner at the consulting firm Guidehouse and former cybersecurity executive with the U.S. National Security Agency. Cyber activism is a low-cost way for them to influence governmental and corporate actions, she said.

“It is protesting in the 21st century,” said Bailey.  

Yet cheering them on can be dangerous in the “fog of war,” she said.

“A cyberattack has the potential for such an immediate impact, in most cases well before any accurate attribution can be determined,” she said. “A cyber strike back or even kinetic strike back could be directed to the wrong place. And what if that misattribution is intentional? What if someone makes the attack appear from a specific country when that’s not true?”

She said cyber warfare can be cheaper, easier, more effective and easier to deny than traditional military warfare, and that it will only increase with time.

“With more devices connected to this global digital ecosystem the opportunity for impact continues to expand,” she said. “It will undoubtedly be used more often in future conflicts.”