Facebook tried to buy Twitter for $500 million 'several years' ago

Co-founder Biz Stone said he "didn't click" with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone helped start Twitter in 2006.

Poor Mark Zuckerberg – it seems that ambitious tech start-ups just love rejecting him. Not only has Snapchat turned down an offer from the Facebook founder but it seems that Twitter did as well.

Biz Stone, founder of the microblogging service, told Sky News that he rejected a $500m (£290m) offer from Facebook ‘several years ago’. A smart move considering that Twitter is now worth more than $23bn after going public with an IPO in November last year.

Mr Stone said that he and co-founder Evan Williams had not been initially willing to sell the company, and had arrived at the $500m figure as one that “no-one would every say yes to”.

However, somewhat unsurprisingly, Mr Zuckerberg felt the company was worth it and drew up an offer later that day - five hundred million being a bit of a bargain compared to the $3bn offered for Snapchat (or the $19bn paid for messaging app WhatsApp).

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone helped start Twitter in 2006.

The Twitter founders turned down the offer, saying they felt they were “just getting started”. Stone also added that he didn’t get on too well with the Facebook boss.

"I like him, and I respect him, it's just that we didn't click. I'm a jokey guy and he's a very serious guy so every joke I made – it was a tough crowd,” Mr Stone told Sky.

Mr Stone left Twitter in 2011 and has since launched his own start-up, a question and answer platform named Jelly. The platform is designed "for people to help one another" by crowd-sourcing queries that Google can't easily handle.

Speaking to Vanity Fair after the app's launch, Mr Stone said that he was inspired by the connected nature of contemporary society to create a 'smarter' search engine: "Sometimes there’s a whole greater than the sum of its parts, like an ant colony can be genius, while an individual ant is an idiot, right?”