UNSPECIFIED - OCTOBER 10: In this photo illustration the YouTube website is dispayed on October 10, 2006. Google has bought YouTube, the popular online video website where users can upload and watch videos for free, for $1.65billion dollars. (Photo Illustration by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
On April 23, 2005, Jawed Karim posted the first video ever uploaded to YouTube, the website he co-founded with two friends a couple of months prior. The 19-second “Me at the zoo” is brief and innocuous enough that you likely wouldn’t guess what inspired Karim to build a video-sharing site after his former PayPal coworkers, Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, initially pitched starting a new venture together: Janet Jackson had a “wardrobe malfunction” during the previous year’s Super Bowl Halftime Show, and Karim couldn’t find a clip of it online anywhere.
