At the beginning of COVID there was a sense that WFH might be a permanent change and that companies might need to start competing on a lot of social distancing features. Look at Clubhouse exploding then, etc. Doubling the size of your workforce (and knowing you can shrink it if you are wrong) is a pretty reasonable bet. It has a known cost (measured in the hundreds of millions to few billions) if you try it and it is unnecessary (which it turned out to be), but a possible "death of the company" result if all the talent is gone just as you need XYZ to be competitive in a new landscape.

You're getting downvoted, but you're correct. Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019. It then took a bath in 2020 (like almost all advertising-based businesses), and then was projected to recover to profitability in 2022 before Musk announced the takeover, which threw everything into a tailspin.

Nit, by then it would have been public market investors, not VCs, for the most part.

Twitter was a public company in 2019. VCs has nothing to do with it.