In cases like this, creating artificial scarcity is very important. Without scarcity, no producer would finance new movies because there’s no way to make back their initial investment. So just like with patents, we create artificial scarcity by giving the people who made the movie exclusive rights to decide who can watch it.

Even though scarcity isn’t enforced upon us like with most goods, it’s in literally everyone’s best interest to create (and enforce) that scarcity.

I’m guessing you’re in favor of counterfeiting currency, then?

Hit the nail on the head. Elon and spez don’t need to keep anywhere close to all their users for this to be a success. From a business perspective, they could lose a quarter of their users and still come out stronger if it means they’ve monetized the rest. Then add in the additional bonus of getting rid of all your ideological, principled troublemakers, leaving you with a platform full of high quality, addicted users that are easy to take advantage of. I don’t like it, but it really is a sensible strategy from a monetization perspective.