Twitter was profitable in a couple of recent years and would have been last year to the tune of several hundred million except for a one-find lawsuit payment. That’s not ideal, but all they needed to do to improve things was reduce their stock based compensation levels to be in line with their class of company rather than [old] Google/Facebook-level.

That changed dramatically when Musk added over a billion dollars in annual debt payment load, and proceeded to torpedo their ad business. That changed it from “our boat leaks” to “the hull is gone”, and dramatically reduced the options for dealing with it.