[qwerasdf5]

If they have a deeper understanding of these things, then why haven't they produced a real competitor?

[dragontamer]

Elon didn't build anything on Twitter. He paid $44 Billion for the website and then collapsed it.

[ambichook]

probably because of the classic "making twitter is easy, getting twitter to a billion people is hard"

[nebula8804]

Well Threads is making pretty decent strides given that it was spun up in record time (by ex-Twitter employees that have an ax to grind for some reason)

[sangnoir]

There were no ex-Twitter employees involved in Threads at the time it launched. AFAICT, it was a frontend over a pared-down Instagram comment-system.

Designing something like Twitter isn't hard, and it used to be a pretty common design question that could be answered in 30 minutes or less. Instagram certainly doesn't need outside help to help scale stuff, let alone people specifically from Twitter.