Twitter’s Main Characters, Not Counting the Usual 140

A blogging pioneer, who sold an early blogging company to Google, Mr. Williams became Twitter’s chief executive in 2008. While he left the company’s day-to-day operations in 2011, he is still on the company’s board. Mr. Williams now runs a company called the Obvious Corporation, which built a publishing platform called Medium. On Medium, he describes himself this way: “I make systems that encourage typing and thinking.” His Twitter stake is worth $1.2 billion.

Mr. Dorsey was Twitter’s first chief executive in early 2007, but he left a year and a half later after the site kept crashing. He and Mr. Williams have a sometimes strained relationship over the company’s direction. At Odeo, Mr. Dorsey was known as a quiet engineer. Today he regularly appears in the media. Mr. Dorsey is a co-founder of Square, a mobile payments company. He is still on Twitter’s board as the executive chairman. Twitter stake: $483 million.

Mr. Stone was on the team that helped start Twitter, but his role grew more nebulous as the company matured. For a while, he was the public face of the company, appearing on “The Colbert Report” and “The View.” He was insistent that users of the service come first, and helped build user privacy features on the site. Mr. Stone left Twitter in 2011 from today’s story and is now building a new start-up, Jelly, which, though now in stealth mode, is expected to offer a social mobile search product.

Dan Krauss for The New York Times

Mr. Glass was responsible for hiring many of Odeo’s early engineers, including Mr. Dorsey. He came up with the name “Twitter” and ran the project within Odeo for its first few months. He left both companies in the summer of 2006. Mr. Glass is currently living in San Francisco and exploring new projects.