You can see them advertising selling ads on their website here: https://loopinput.com/this-is-what-elon-musks-first-website-...
Here's an article from '99 that even quotes Musk on it: https://www.clickz.com/zip2-launches-ad-program-to-aid-newsp...
>“In today’s market, traditional local businesses need to be online to participate in the electronic commerce revolution,” said Elon Musk, founder and executive vice president of Zip2. “With Zip2’s Internet Start Program, our newspaper partners can offer their print advertisers an easy, low-cost way to take that first critical step.”
And now he's spent $44 billion buying a company that he knew primarily made its money from advertising and then spent his first week as owner complaining about advertisers leaving -- not something one who doesn't want to be in the advertising business normally does.
I don't feel like this massively weakens my argument.
So I agree, and feel like the default assumption is that he's going to try to get users to directly pay for content, which is what he's doing with Twitter Blue. We'll see if it works.