The reason why businesses fail after becoming wildly successful is because of mismanagement. You could literally do nothing, spend nothing, and as a company invest in t bonds and index funds, and end up better than America Online, Sears, Myspace, etc.
It's all just one big old poker game.
It's funny to see ATProto as an example of openness, while we're yet to see a real-world example of a viable project which doesn't rely on Bluesky. And I don't mean whether they're "decentralized" or not - the entire AT Proto stack actively works against interop with other standard protocols for various functions of the stack. It's like "open core" at protocol level, only we don't know exactly how they plan to monetize.