"Everyone calls me stupid every time I bring up the fact that Twitter had a better TikTok before TikTok in Vine"

The view that "Vine was tiktok before tiktok" is extremely common. Vine was very popular, was a trend beachhead, but it just wasn't something Twitter was really interested in so they shanked it.

Speaking of which, I didn't realize that musical.ly morphed into TikTok. I knew musical.ly only from Paymoneywubby - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmphkNDosg

IMHO, this course of events also paints a likely outcome had Twitter acquired Instagram instead of Facebook.

Instagram became dominant because it had Facebook's engineering and infrastructure resources. Had they fallen into Twitter's hands, it would be little more than a camera app and a way to embed photos into tweets and or been shut down.

TikTok is as far as I know not profitable. There’s a limit how much investor money you can burn on an app that isn’t making money. But I would say it’s safe to assume the CCP will gladly burn billions to ensure they have a social media platform that’s used worldwide.

American VCs have lived and died on the “customer count first, profitability later” mantra for the better part of a decade.