I use twitter daily and the site is a shell of its former self. It's slow, prone to bugs, filled with bots, the amount of real users has cratered, user reports go nowhere, there's no support team, the ads are now bot accounts posting crap like "Today is a good day, be sure to make advantageous", there are no new features besides previously in-flight projects pre-Musk, they've actually removed a lot of features (like Circles, block lists, etc), and much more. He took an otherwise functioning social media service and forced it into maintenance mode. He also fired all of the people that keep the user base alive so now it's flooded with bots (which he presumably likes so he can boast about engagement being up). So yes it's still around but it's dying and the skeleton crew he has left can't do anything.
In other words, he destroyed it.
Keeping a website afloat is far less capital intensive than running a car maker. If you are building cars, you have to have a continuous massive amount of investment into development. For running a social media website you just need competent staff and cover hardware costs.
You can free-float X to a certain extent, just make sure neither users nor advertisers run away. If you are building cars and a model completely falls flat you are easily down billions of dollars.
Seriously, whats different this time?