The sustainable part comes from the fact that their revenue is $1B more than their expense every year. Some hypothetical about sad conservatives hurting their engagement doesn't negate the fact that it's a massive profitable business.

Revenue numbers are backwards-looking and don't tell us much about sustainability of growth, especially for an information technology company whose income can turn on a dime.

Regarding "sad conservatives" (lol), my view is that companies like Twitter know where the troll/bot/disinformation accounts lie, but don't like to remove them unless necessary because deletion is an acknowledgement of the problem and also a hit to MAUs. Forced moderation by regulators would provide impetus to clear out those accounts and also curtail the frothy indignation upon which Twitter feeds.

The chief churner of that indignation in recent memory, for audiences on both sides of the aisle lest we forget, has been Trump. He has also been the glue of Twitter's relevance, and the beginning of his presidency marked the turnaround of a decline in Twitter's stock.

I realize that the pre-Trump era was a long time ago, but if you look back to what people thought about Twitter the company circa early 2016, it was not positive. Their stock was on a one-way ticket to the dumpster, they were laying off staff with frequency, they were losing popularity to Snapchat of all things, people were pumping out articles about who was going to buy them out. If you want to know why it took them so long to ban Trump, it's because Trump winning the presidency and making it his primary speech platform propped up the whole company.

You can try to minimize this all you want, but it's not clear to me that Twitter is some runaway train that will survive without him, ignore the fact the government is starting to sniff around.

> Trump leaving Twitter (or rather, having the microphone yanked out of his tiny hands) is going to impact the engagement that the platform facilitates. It remains to be seen what that impact will be, but I don't see how it can be positive.

A bunch of right-wing trolls leaving for greener grass increases the civility on the platform and thus the attractiveness for everyday people, plus it leads to political good-will in a large part of the population, and especially a more friendly environment for brands to advertise in... few brands want to appear next to Qanon posts, a problem that Youtube and Facebook both have publicly faced in the last years.