It is lucky that the hackers only request bitcoins.
Imagine how it looked if Elon Musk tweeted that he is investigating building nuclear missiles to fight Russia or Bill Gates tweeting about how to steal data from China or M$ competition!
Given the wide scope of the campaign, the damage could have been Much worse. This was probably malware in the wild that hit a jackpot for the hacker group and they cashed in as quick as they could...
Accounts have been hijacked on Twitter before, but this is the first time it's happened at this scale, so I am guessing that the hackers grabbed control of a Twitter employee's account using a none targeted malware attack.