The money used to come from advertisers. Elon has been trying to move it to a subscription model, but few people want to subscribe to a place only right wingers want to be.

Elon wanted Xitter to be a bastion of right wing speech. He just didn't think about what that would entail.

It was always going to fail. At that point, Twitter as a company only recently started actually making a profit. What Musk did is called a leveraged buy-out where someone takes out a loan to buy a company. The company that is bought out is then responsible for paying that loan. Remember when I said they just barely had started making money? Well, now they have so much debt that they not only have to make enough money to cover their previous expenses, but also cover the payments for this new loan, and the new loan has interest that creates additional debt of $1 billion a year. How is a company that struggles to make money suddenly going to come up with an extra $1 billion a year? Charging for checkmarks? There aren't enough users... That's why he is so desperate. He knows that by making that joke offer, he royally screwed himself when Twitter called his bluff and forced him to buy. I think he just wanted an excuse to sell some Tesla stock that he knew was overvalued but had said he wouldn't sell.