I think Twitter was long dead. It just had no prospect of making money, but slowly degrade into more “heavy VF” propaganda machine it had been for years, and recent series of events is its heart attack at Leviathan timescale.
I don’t understand why people say this: Twitter wasn’t lucrative in the way that Facebook is, but they made a healthy profit in 2019 and probably would have made a small profit in 2021 had it not made settlement payments. Their revenue per employee was close to $1M, which is about 2/3rds of Google’s.
It’s not clear, either then or now, that Twitter “had no prospect of making money.” By most metrics, it was a potentially (and in actuality) very profitable company with a history of mismanagement.
Twitter was already struggling with right wing nutjobs and banana republics before El Muskrat got into the mix. Beyond that, Twitter was absolutely struggling to monetize eyeballs. While it wasn't about to implode in the short-term I don't think anyone expected Twitter to stick around long-term without significant changes. El Muskrat just doused the whole thing in acetone and dropped a big fat blunt on it.
I agree with this! My point was that Twitter was not destined to fail: it had (has!) hundreds of millions of high-value users who treated (treat!) it as a news and culture feed. They made lots of money off of those users; the fact that they weren't more regularly profitable is an indictment of management rather than the fundamental business model.
This entire thing is an extended farce in two acts: (1) Twitter's leadership's inability to turn a highly addictive social media network into a regular money fountain, and (2) the sale of a potential regular money fountain to the single least qualified person possible.
Twitter was profitable for, what, a single quarter in 2019? That's not sustainable. But yeah we're talking years before a major cash crunch not weeks. Elno accelerated that timeline pretty dramatically.
If pigs had wings they could fly, but they don't so they can't. Almost profitable is not actually profitable, and Twitter was profitable for a brief moment in time with no indication that it was or would be sustainable.
Twitter had reasonably healthy finances and steadily growing revenue. It turned profit in 2018 and 2019 and could have fully recovered from the 2020 slump within a few more quarters.
A change in leadership (never been a fan of Dorsey) and a refocus on core competencies could have given it a big boost - if it was planned and executed competently. But what we got with Musk is the exact opposite of that. The amount of fuckup is truly amazing to watch.
