I suspect that if you have asshole friends, extortion is also a status symbol…
And, given how long Twitter sat on its hands and did nothing, despite this being one of only 26 maximally-iconic usernames, the attacker apparently did an atypically good job of sowing enough doubt/possible legitimacy/something to have had a reasonably credible shot.
Given the PR issues at play, and the fact that Twitter currently has a giant market cap made mostly of magic internet optimism to consider, the attacker must have had something pretty good (or twitter some sort of major malfunction extending well up the food chain and into the power-wielding humans) to make the attack stick for as long as it did. If I’d been betting, I’d have put the time-to-resolution at well under half what it ended up being, and most of that just being allowance for Official Postage to work its way back and forth between the contending parties…
