The product has had several new features added, is more performant, the bots have been culled, and a rebrand is common when a company is going in a new direction. Not to mention when Elon first bought the company he announced his goal was to create an "everything app" called X so I'd hardly call the move "desperate".
It's definitely not "anyone who browses the trending topic for a sports event" because you'll still see hundreds of scammy "WATCH LIVE AT ..." tweets per hour.
Twitter as a platform and product works better today than it did a year ago. Less bots makes a huge difference.
It's also not hard to imagine why they lost 50% of their advertisers. 50% kind of lines up with the percentage of "woke" (horrible label, but whatever) companies out there who basically "had to" pull their ad dollars to not piss off the camp they put themselves in.
Prognostication is fun, but to be honest, we don't really have any idea whether or not this rebranding and redirection will work. Time will tell.
I, however, applaud people willing to take moonshots.
Scaling down engineering and product, reducing revenue by significant amounts in order to reach "profitability" is not directionally in line with a moonshot.
SpaceX, sure - but what he's doing to Twitter is straight from a private equity / corporate raider textbook.
