Twenty years ago, Jack Dorsey posted “just setting up my twittr.”
What seemed like a simple experiment has become a key moment in internet history.
Now, as the post turns 20, people are reflecting on how those five words helped launch a platform that changed media, politics, humor, and online culture.
A simple post that became a symbol of the social web
Republic World called it the first ever tweet and noted that after two decades and major changes on the platform, the simple post now feels like an iconic start of a digital age.
The publication also said Dorsey marked the anniversary by reposting the message and writing, “five words. 20 years. unfinished.”
TechCrunch put the anniversary in a more complex modern context. It pointed out that the site is still best known as Twitter, even after Elon Musk renamed it X, and that the platform now operates in a very different corporate and cultural world than the one Dorsey started in 2006. X became part of Musk’s xAI, which later joined SpaceX.
The anniversary is also a reminder of how much Twitter changed
Republic World used the anniversary to look back at how much the platform has changed.
It followed Twitter’s visual history from the early light-blue wordmark to the blue bird, and then to the black-and-white X logo after Musk took over.
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and later laid off employees and removed top executives, including former CEO Parag Agrawal.
TechCrunch was more direct about what happened after the ownership change. It said Musk cut the company’s workforce dramatically and connected X’s current situation to new controversies involving Grok and ongoing platform instability.
X retains a strong hold on some user groups, especially in the tech industry, even as it faces competition from Bluesky and Meta’s Threads.
From a tweet to a multimillion-dollar NFT
The anniversary also brought new attention to what happened to the original post.
Dorsey sold an NFT version of the first tweet in 2021 for $2.9 million, to crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi. The NFT’s value has since plummeted, with the buyer unable to resell it.
That quick shift from an everyday post to a multimillion-dollar collectible and then to a devalued asset says a lot about Twitter’s place in internet culture.
The message was once seen as a special piece of the early social web, but it also became part of the speculative boom that briefly turned digital memories into expensive tokens.
A platform that shaped culture, then started losing its own archive
Financial Express used the 20-year milestone to highlight something more important than nostalgia: preservation.
It said a new archive project is trying to save the funniest, strangest, and most memorable tweets before they disappear from a platform where features are breaking and users leaving. The paper called the project a digital preservation effort and said it aims to capture internet culture before it fades away.
That concern helps explain why Dorsey’s first tweet still matters. When Dorsey posted “just setting up my twttr,” it marked the beginning of a new kind of internet communication, and what followed was not just conversation but a cultural phenomenon.
Tweets, were never designed to last, which makes the anniversary feel less like a celebration of permanence and more like a reminder of how fragile online history can be.
Two decades later, the first tweet still feels surprisingly modern in its simplicity.
It had no hashtag, no image, no promotional plan, and no sign that it would become one of the most famous posts in internet history.
That’s exactly why it lasts: it captures the moment before Twitter turned into a battlefield, a newsroom, a meme factory, and eventually X.
It was just a beginning, and 20 years later, the web is still living with what followed.
