The 389k figure is incredibly out there but it's also really specific, if I had to take a shot in the dark I'd say Tess has totally maxed every source of credit available to her and needs around $300k to pay the majority of it off.
I assumed she needs a big chunk of that $389K (or, rather, the roughly half she's left with after the social media platform and the IRS get their cuts) as a down payment on a condo in a decent neighborhood in/near Long Beach. Her credit is currently shit, and her income is increasingly erratic and unreliable, so a big down payment is the only way she's going to get a mortgage loan that she can afford the payments on.
Paying off debt and doing credit repair prior to applying for a mortgage loan may also be part of it—it should be.
But good luck getting 3% of her total follower count to subscribe; most of them, by now, are ghost accounts, abandoned by users who have moved on. Then there's bound to be a lot of bots, a lot of thirsty foreign men with no money, and a lot of gawkers and hatewatchers.
That leaves the feeders and the fat chicks who actively follow her and engage with her content, which is maybe 10-15% of her total followers (if she's lucky), but is no doubt a lot less. They haven't subscribed to her before, which means they're unlikely to start.
Tess is basically fucked; she's not going to pick up 78,000 new subscribers to finance a new place to live; she'll be really lucky to pick up 78.
I'm convinced she's staying in an AirBNB right now, and it occurred to me today that she's now one of what I've come to think of as the "secret" homeless: people who have lost a house or apartment, can't afford the move-in costs for another, and now have no permanent residence. They can still
just afford to keep a roof over their heads in the form of AirBNBs or monthly-rate motels, and thus maintain employment and the superficial appearance of normality, so nobody thinks of them as homeless. But, in effect, they are, and should they lose their jobs their homelessness would quickly become not a secret at all.