How Noah Glass Built a $44 Billion Empire—Only to Be Written Out of History

The Silicon Valley narrative loves a winner. But it rarely tells you about the ones who got left behind.

Take Noah Glass, for instance. He’s not a household name. You won’t find statues of him in tech campuses. Yet, the platform that became Twitter—the one Elon Musk bought for $44 billion—started in his hands. This is the story of how ambition, timing, and ruthless business decisions can erase a founder’s legacy before it even begins.

The Forgotten Blueprint: Noah Glass and Odeo

Before Twitter was even a gleam in anyone’s eye, Noah Glass was already thinking bigger. In the early 2000s, he founded Odeo, a podcasting platform that was genuinely ahead of its time. Podcasts? They were niche at best, irrelevant at worst. But Noah believed in the medium.

He assembled a team that would later become the backbone of tech innovation:

• Evan Williams, who served as CEO and would later become a billionaire
• Jack Dorsey, then a talented but relatively unknown coder obsessed with cryptic SMS-based systems

Together, they were building something. But the market had other plans.

When Steve Jobs Changed Everything

In 2005, Apple released iTunes with built-in podcasting functionality. Overnight, Odeo’s value proposition vanished. The company that Noah Glass had poured his vision into became obsolete, outmaneuvered by a giant with infinitely more resources.

Facing extinction, Noah did what most founders do: he refused to give up. He called his team together for a final brainstorm session—a last desperate attempt to salvage something from the wreckage.

That’s when Jack Dorsey presented an idea: a simple, SMS-based platform where people could post brief status updates for their networks. Elegant in its simplicity. Radical in its potential.

Noah didn’t just greenlight the concept. He nurtured it. He refined it. He named it. He pushed it forward. The platform we’d later call Twitter was born not from a single genius, but from a founder’s refusal to let his crew’s talents go to waste.

The Machinery of Betrayal

Here’s where Silicon Valley’s dark underbelly shows itself.

Evan Williams—the same person Noah Glass trusted to lead their venture—made a calculated move. He told investors that this new SMS project wasn’t particularly promising. Why? Because he wanted to buy Twitter back from the company at a discount, then resell it for massive profit.

Then came the real knife in the back. Jack Dorsey, the coder who pitched the original idea, decided that Noah Glass had become expendable. Not through a respectful conversation. Not through a negotiated exit. But through a text message, delivered before Twitter even had emoji support.

Noah Glass was out. No equity stake. No founder credit. No seat at the table watching his creation soar.

Evan Williams pulled the trigger on the decision. The message was clear: you’re done here.

The Irony of Success

By 2007, Twitter wasn’t just growing—it was exploding. Celebrities flocked to it. Politicians used it. Journalists reported on it. Eventually, it became the digital town square of the world.

Jack Dorsey took the CEO title. The vision became reality. The empire expanded.

But Noah Glass’s name? It disappeared. History was rewritten by those who remained, and the architect of the original concept was erased from the narrative.

The Billion-Dollar Twist

Fast forward to 2022. Twitter had become a cultural behemoth—so powerful and so valuable that Elon Musk decided it was worth acquiring. The price tag: $44 billion. An astronomical sum that represented not just a platform, but a cultural institution.

Musk then rebranded the entire platform to X, positioning it as his vision for the future of social media and digital communication.

Throughout all of this—the rebranding, the acquisition, the endless headlines—Noah Glass remained a forgotten figure. The man who catalyzed the entire story was relegated to footnotes, if mentioned at all.

What This Really Means

The narrative of Noah Glass isn’t just a cautionary tech tale. It’s a comment on how power works in capitalism.

You can be visionary and still be sidelined. You can build the blueprint and still be locked out of the building. You can create something world-changing and watch others take credit—and profit—from your work.

Noah Glass didn’t just lose a company. He lost the right to be remembered as part of its creation. The founders who remained wrote history in their favor. The equity they held multiplied. The accolades followed.

The Unspoken Truth

But here’s the thing: even if Noah Glass’s name faded from the headlines, the DNA of what he created lives on. Every tweet sent, every world leader who uses the platform, every cultural moment amplified through it—that traces back to his vision, his refusal to let Odeo’s collapse end everything, his decision to nurture an idea that seemed absurd at the time.

History might be written by winners. But legacy? Legacy belongs to those who built the foundation, whether they’re remembered for it or not.

The next time you see Twitter or X in the news, remember the name Noah Glass. He’s the founder nobody talks about—the architect of a $44 billion platform who got written out of his own story.