Not only do they need viewers, they need content that doesn’t actively drive away advertisers, they need people to be able to trust those that claim to be legit, and they need policies that don’t directly fuck with advertisers (the Eli Lilly insulin fiasco). And they don’t need Elon publicly threatening to reveal advertisers who pulled or paused their ads as if he’s going to sic his fanboys on them, or Elon just acting shitty with advertisers in general. He needs advertisers more than they need him
Oh, and if advertisers are spending millions, they want stability, not somebody making changes to the live platform to see what happens..
I was in the tech industry for nearly 20 years, and am still somewhat involved, and I encountered many tech bro types like Elon that thought of everything in terms of black or white, 1s or 0s. Musk thought he’d bring “free speech” to the most visible public square around, but he he came in without a solid understanding of what free speech actually is (and yes, it includes things such as parody) or even what the Constitution has to say (and where the Constitution doesn’t apply) and he didn’t understand why advertisers didn’t love his changes.
Free speech to Musk was either 1 or 0, on or off, and he didn’t understand the nuances behind it, so he got upset at the parody accounts and threatened to ban them unless they labeled themselves as such, because Musk doesn’t get humor or parody very well. He wants you to say anything you want, but only if you say it in the way he wants you to say it, which is not the wide-open Wild West free speech he thinks he’s promoting,
And when Musk threatened to reveal advertisers who were pulling or pausing their spending, he failed to see the humans behind those companies who got really fucking pissed that he threatened them. He just saw them as problems that annoyed him, not as the companies who would determine whether he can make a profit or lose money.
And unfortunately because he doesn’t understand nuanced issues very well, he’s decided he can engineer his way out of the financial mess, as if Twitter is just a rocket booster that needs to land, and he just needs the right software fix to make that happen.
As if simplifying the interface or speeding it up slightly, or reducing the amount of bandwidth needed, will bring billions of dollars to the platform. Twitter is a people problem, not a software problem.