Twitter’s original plan was to run in cash infusion mode as long as possible. They never even substantially tried to monetize. They had links to all the other platforms, that all the best celebrities in journalists. Besides having just some tech debt issues they could have easily spun an AI product and sold the exact interests of their entire user base to the highest bidder.

Everybody sliding into AI right now isn’t an accident. They train a model on the corpus of everyone’s interactions. It creates a model deeply seated with everyone’s likes and dislikes. They can use the model to infer stuff that’s not even exactly stated. They can lump people together that you wouldn’t be able to do in a conventional manner.

That user base, in the right hands, was worth the money. Just not necessarily for shoving ads in their faces on the site.