Remember Dalton Caldwell's App.net. That didn't even get off the ground and it had a ton of YC press.
Network affects are real.
Even still he could pay people to use his application. Pay businesses $20 a month for a verified business account. Pay individual users $10-100 a month based on activity and engagement. Does it scale? Absolutely not but I still think it'd end up cheaper than $44 billion.
It doesn't. No one's ever made it work. You need users and creators and users are considerably more stubborn than creators.
There are plenty of people trying to replicate the success of the existing social networks, but they're all doing it for $10's - $100's millions.
How much traction would you get if you paid the top 5,000 Twitter accounts $5 million to post exclusively on your new social network?
> "So to recap, Twitter exploded onto the scene in 2007, the "fail whale" appeared a lot, developers made all sorts of wonderful programs hooked into Twitter, the fail whale disappeared, Twitter started to destroy the app ecosystem, App.net launched to great fanfare in response to Twitter's knuckleheaded anti-developer stance, Britney Spears and Justin Bieber arrived and knocked all the nerds out of the top spots on Twitterholic, Donald Trump came and bludgeoned everyone with his bombastic prose, and now App.net is shutting down. And after all this, Twitter still does not have a viable business model."