I daresay Facebook could manage on <$1bn... Is Twitter's current product so much more complicated than it was circa 2012, that it needs 100X as many employees,

I daresay Facebook could manage on <$1bn... Is Twitter's current product so much more complicated than it was circa 2012, that it needs 100X as many employees, resources and such? If Wikipedia had been founded later, it probably would have been a startup. A unicorn, considering how popular it is. It would be burning through far more resources. Comparing it to any commercial site of comparable size, it is orders of magnitude more efficient. Meanwhile, it makes its money by asking. It doesn't snoop, sell your data, or participate in creepy ad-tech. So... when a person like me, who gets tremendous value and enjoyment from wikipedia is asked to kick in, we do. I do it gladly. They have, in my estimation, every right to ask me. The donation banners that seem to upset people are far less annoying than any commercial site's cookie/privacy popups. Tangentially, think of all the truth wars of the last few years. Notice that wikipedia, even though it deals directly with the hard part of this problem, has fared much better than most other websites/organisations. This is not a coincidence. Can wikipedia operate on $10m? Maybe, plausibly. Why should they have to? Wikipedia is a shining beacon, in many ways, including resource efficiency. They successfully bridged the gap between OSS, and non distributed organisational elements... allowing them to own servers and such. Few have.