Twitter wouldn't die if they don't pay bills, someone would buy it for huge discount. It seems like it would be the best way forward, depending on who would buy it. A lot of people don't follow news or Elon drama, the brand still has a lot of value. Especially abroad where news about Elon are much fewer.
It'd have to be a huge discount as they'd be buying the debt along with it. Why would someone want to saddle themselves with an unprofitable debt burden?
BofA/whoever lent $12B or whatever to Twitter/Elon. Ultimately they have to settle for lower payments or get Tesla stock or whatever, and the debt is cleared. Or it defaults. Either way, Twitter the service has no reason to shut down, and doesn't carry that debt further.
Once the debt cost is sunk, what matters is future marginal profitability.
The social graph on Twitter is hugely valuable. Even if they went bust and the service would be unavailable for a year, the social graph and brand value are important.
One reason Mastodon and others have trouble is that people don't want to follow random people, they want to follow the same people they did on Twitter. It's their community.
Certain communities did make a successful switch, like Apple and Tech journalist communities, but not a lot of other communities.
This seems to be taken as given, but how specifically would you expect someone to simply monetize the social graph? Just because data exists doesn't mean that anyone wants to pay for it.
As for the value of the brand itself, we could say the same thing about Yahoo in 2010.
Dear advertisers, so you want to reach _specific_social_demographic? Good news, I can tell you 500k people who have demonstrated 3 points of identification with that demo in the last 14 days and are minimum 5% likely to interact positively with a promoted tweet from a firm in your market sector.
You can really pull a lot of useful data on someone by just looking at their follow choices, self-identification, and reply/retweeting behavior. And that's before you add all the information Twitter maintains on things like profile views or video plays, or the consistency of entity identification in tweet content etc. I can give you very specific kinds of demographics like 'people who enjoy tweets about dogs and football but not cats or politics.'
This market already exists (I get spam offering customer lead lists every couple of days). I suspect most orgs of a reasonable size are already being bombarded similarly.
Augmenting these lists with Twitter's data might improve/expand the lists bur won't create much extra value imo, because the demand side won't change.
