I don't think Twitter were fine: they were consistently losing money (to your point, not a ton, but still, losing money even in a great economy), with large layoffs to come, esp once you factor in a 20% or so fall in ad income. With more income cuts, and hence layoffs, on the way as privacy laws worldwide make Twitter worse as an ad platform.
So I would argue that Twitter desperately needs to either get much better as an ads platform, or switch to some form of product that generates subscription revenues. I think that does require large changes and a bunch of features. Maybe not better programmers; probably just product pointing the programmers they had towards different features.
And they already had been a target for activist investors; that was going to continue, regardless of the stock price. See Elliot Management in 2020/2021. So if Musk hadn't done this, I bet someone else would have.
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.
... with ever increasing revenue to cover it. If you take a look at the quarterly reports, clearly they had a spending problem and not so much a problem with ads.
The business was fine. The leaders were not. Despite that, they certainly weren't bringing Twitter to the brink of bankruptcy.
Pretty much "everyone" in the valley had large layoffs coming. Only Apple and Google have escaped it so far. This is a product of the stupid "grow unbounded" consensus that reigned there, not any idiocy unique to the companies.
So I would argue that Twitter desperately needs to either get much better as an ads platform, or switch to some form of product that generates subscription revenues. I think that does require large changes and a bunch of features. Maybe not better programmers; probably just product pointing the programmers they had towards different features.
And they already had been a target for activist investors; that was going to continue, regardless of the stock price. See Elliot Management in 2020/2021. So if Musk hadn't done this, I bet someone else would have.