Some of Twitter’s struggles predate Musk. The company had been hemorrhaging celebrities and high-profile figures in entertainment and media for years as they moved to more visual-focused platforms, and it has long faced difficulties retaining younger users.

Twitter’s biggest struggle is that it’s an arcane follow-based social network, meaning users must manually seek out other users to follow to receive content, and if a user has no followers, it’s very hard to be heard. Contrast that with an app like TikTok, which delivers content through a highly sophisticated algorithmic feed. This means that even a user with zero followers on TikTok can reach millions with their first video.