In that context, what’s important in these quarterly numbers here isn’t that the revenue went up or that it was less than what analysts expected — it was the composition of that revenue. Last year, Twitter made 89 percent of its money from advertising, and under Agrawal, the company became even more reliant on ads to keep things afloat. Subscriptions, under the hardly used Twitter Blue feature, have never been a big part of the business, but revenue from that and data licensing actually decreased 31 percent during the first quarter to $94 million. (Those two business lines are lumped together, so it’s impossible to say how much one makes over the other from this report.) The upshot here is that Agrawal is handing off a company that’s getting larger and more reliant on advertisers just as Musk is vowing to come in and totally remake the 16-year-old company — perhaps through still-hazy plans to push through a subscriber model that’s losing currency by the day.

Would you pay for a Twitter subscription? Maybe some power users would, but this isn’t Raya. As long as Snap, Facebook, and TikTok remain free, there would only be more of an incentive for people to remain on those networks — especially since meme pages just screencap the most viral tweets anyway. The problem Twitter faces — converting readers into paying customers — is similar to the one faced by an industry the company helped lay waste to: newspapers. Maybe Musk can pull it off, but there’s hardly a straightforward solution here.