Your argument that there are key people at twitter that need to stay on to keep up understanding of the code makes sense to me. But I don't think the following quote is true:
> Twitter has no meaningful assets other than the talented people that work there.
I think the main asset of twitter is their userbase and more importantly their brand. The simple fact that twitter is at the core of politics and the news-cycle is where most of the value at twitter comes from.
Twitter's engineers are vital to keeping twitter running. But that doesn't make it an asset. It's not something you can sell on or somehow convert into cash.
Not to trivialize Twitter's infrastructure and the people who keep it running--remember the fail whale?--but the #1 through #10 reasons of why it would/will be very difficult for anyone/ones to stand up another Twitter is that everyone (to a first approximation) is on Twitter and the vast majority won't move somewhere else or they'll try moving to a bunch of different places.
It will take very little disruption to the service quality (think slow/janky app, service/feature outages, buggy functionality like search/filter not working reliably) for users to flee the service and move on to the next happening thing. The current user base twitter has is a result of key input activities – stable/performant software service at scale, growth hacking and marketing to cultivate/retain high-profile content generators/curators, third party tools ecosystem for whale users etc. Each of these things are not in a stable equilibrium. They need constant attention to keep them working. That requires talent AND understanding of current systems/mechanics. So if I were buying a service like Twitter, I would consider the brand/userbase as output (it is what I'm valuing, but not what I'm buying) and consider the code/mechanics and the talent that goes with it as the input (what I'm really buying).
> Twitter has no meaningful assets other than the talented people that work there.
I think the main asset of twitter is their userbase and more importantly their brand. The simple fact that twitter is at the core of politics and the news-cycle is where most of the value at twitter comes from. Twitter's engineers are vital to keeping twitter running. But that doesn't make it an asset. It's not something you can sell on or somehow convert into cash.