Who Created MySpace? Meet the Founders

Ask most people who created MySpace and you will get one name: Tom. Tom Anderson, the guy who was automatically your first friend on the site, whose profile photo became one of the most recognized faces in early social media without him ever becoming a conventional celebrity. But Tom Anderson did not build MySpace alone, and the fuller story involves a small team working inside a company most people have never heard of.

The company before the company

MySpace was not built by a scrappy pair of founders in a garage. It was built inside eUniverse, an online marketing and content company where Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe already worked. DeWolfe was an executive with a marketing background, and Anderson had worked in web design and product roles at the company. The two of them, along with a small internal team that included Josh Berman and other eUniverse engineers, put MySpace together in about ten days during the summer of 2003, drawing heavily on lessons learned from watching an earlier social site called Friendster.

Friendster matters here, because MySpace was in many ways a direct response to it. Friendster had real early momentum but struggled with technical performance and, notably, with policies that removed users it decided were using fake names or personas. MySpace deliberately let people be whoever they wanted to be, which turned out to be one of its defining, and eventually most complicated, product decisions.

Tom Anderson: the default friend

Tom Anderson became MySpace's public face largely by design. Every new user was automatically connected to him as their first friend, a simple onboarding decision that turned him into arguably the most "met" person on the early internet. He held the title of president of MySpace, and his approachable, informal profile photo became a piece of internet folklore in its own right.

Analysis: the "Tom as your first friend" mechanic is one of the smartest, cheapest pieces of product design in early social media. It solved the empty-network problem instantly: no user ever opened MySpace to zero friends and zero activity. It also personalized the entire company behind one recognizable, non-threatening face. When MySpace removed this feature in 2010 in favor of an automated help account, it was a small technical change with an outsized symbolic cost.

Chris DeWolfe: the operator

Chris DeWolfe served as MySpace's chief executive officer through its founding, its 2005 sale to News Corporation for 580 million dollars, and several years of explosive growth afterward. DeWolfe handled the business side: negotiations with News Corp, the 2006 advertising partnership with Google reported at roughly 900 million dollars over three years, and the day-to-day running of a company that scaled from a side project to the most visited website in the United States within about three years.

DeWolfe stepped down as CEO in 2009 as News Corp installed a former Facebook executive, Owen Van Natta, to try to reverse MySpace's declining position against Facebook. Tom Anderson left his operational role around the same time.

What happened to them afterward

Neither founder stayed in a senior role at MySpace much past 2009. DeWolfe went on to co-found other companies, including work in mobile gaming and technology ventures. Anderson stepped back from the tech industry's public eye almost entirely, becoming better known in later years for his photography and a much quieter public profile than his MySpace-era fame.

Why this matters in 2026

The founding story of MySpace matters because it explains a lot about why the platform behaved the way it did. It was built quickly, inside a marketing company, by people who understood attention and community more instinctively than they understood scalable infrastructure. That combination is exactly what made MySpace feel human and chaotic in a way Facebook never did, and it is also exactly what made it hard to defend once a more disciplined, engineering-first competitor showed up. Any conversation about reviving MySpace's spirit in 2026 eventually has to reckon with the fact that its most beloved qualities and its most fatal weaknesses came from the same two founders making the same instinctive bets.