Twitter’s financials for server costs have never made sense - the amount of money required to serve the sheer volume of engagement can’t possibly have been resolved by ads that Elon is somehow refusing to keep tapping into.
I’d wager that some other interested party engaged in some type of private-public partnership was floating costs for (let’s call it “privileged”) access to the backend of Twitter – granting a bottomless pit of funding to keep the platform running no matter the cost.
Once Twitter left the hands of someone deemed trustworthy, that life support doesn’t stick around – leaving Twitter facing complete insolvency by October of this year unless Musk literally does whatever he can to reduce engagement to save on costs.
Twitter loses more money when it has more engagement. If you have 100k users and add a new one, every interaction that additional user makes with tweets viewed by those 100k existing users requires 100k updates pushed to those 100k users’ pages. Every like sends a ln update of +1 like on the tweet to every one of the 100k users. It becomes significantly more expensive per user engagement.
The ads being seen by additional users don’t cover that constantly-compounding cost to keep engagements up to date across the platform. Musk isn’t being honest about the reasoning (web scraping issues my ass) and is scrambling to buy desperately-needed to keep the platform up past October.
I think this goes to show just how impossible a business model like Twitter’s was from the jump and shines a light on the absurdity of it being self-sustaining without a massive source of reliable external funding.