On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey posted his first ever famous tweet: “just setting up my twttr”
just setting up my twttr
— jack (@jack) March 21, 2006
But in the weeks prior, Jack had been rushing to build a working prototype of twitter with the help of some employees at Odeo. One of them was Crystal Taylor, who he not only heavily courted to become his girlfriend (unsuccessfully), according to the book Hatching Twitter, but who ultimately became his best friend. Even when Jack was ousted from the company in October 2008, the two remained best friends as evidenced in the book and by Jack’s and her own tweets saying so from 2009 – 2011.
And later on in March 2011, when Jack returned back to twitter as Head of Product and Executive Chairman (and when Satoshi Nakamoto was disappearing forever), he took it upon himself to publish some internal chat logs and emails that showed off twitter’s founding days in 2006. It turns out that in a test run before the original version ever went into production, Jack copied and pasted a log of a working demo and sent it to Biz Stone on March 8, 2006, showing that he was able to see the pre-release first tweets of Biz, Noah, Ev, Florian, Dom, and Crystal by SMS.
His best friend Crystal’s first ever tweet was: “satoshi tomeii!”
Crystal was referencing the Japanese DJ Satoshi Tomiie, who she listened to at Ruby Skye in San Francisco on March 4, 2006. When the final version of twitter went live, she would tweet about him again in March 2007 and again in February 2008. So Jack’s best friend, who he once tried to woo by leaving origami cranes on her desk at Odeo, wrote satoshi as her first ever test tweet.
What are the odds?
Considering the later significance of Jack’s first ever tweet (it sold for $2.9M), it’d be quite fitting that Jack would have chosen the first tweet of the girl he loved most to draw his pseudonym from. Had they ended up together, as he hoped, he would’ve been able to make that claim to her.