Despite lofty messages about changing the world, every startup is ultimately destined for the wood chipper of finance. Twitter actually did pretty good. It wasn't a fire sale, they managed to find a buyer who would significantly overpay, and they actually did so right before a market downturn. From a shareholder perspective, this was a wild success.

As far as the damage to the people working at the company, welcome to living under a paperclip-maximizing economy. It was abrupt to have the buyer do the analog of the rich guy cliche of buying a sports car just to crash it on the way home. But in some sense it's better than watching the pot slowly boil with cost cutting, dark patterns, and more surveillance ("ad") tech.

You also underestimate just how much companies pay for shit in general. Couches/chairs from Ikea can work for a tiny company, but that's about the limit. Above that, things just need to be built better so they can function as an abstraction and be forgotten about. Plus, the mood that couch helped set was instrumental in increasing the sale value of the company - see goal #1.

The point of a normal for-profit company is to make money for investors (ie: owners). Period. The employees are merely a means to an end and irrelevant beyond that end.

If you're concerned about that shouldn't your critiques be aimed at the person currently wrecking the company with massive debt, rather than the expense of a single couch that's like one month comp for a single engineer?

They wouldn't have a job even if the Seattle office had a futon rescued from a garbage bin instead of a $10k couch.