while it's not impossible, it's important to distinguish the product from the network.

The network is interdependently run by many individuals across a large variety of platforms that aren't just Mastodon. There's Pleroma, MissKey, Friendica, PeerTube, Plume, Funkwhale, Hubzilla, Socialhome, and that's just a few of them. They communicate on an agreed-upon communication standard (ActivityPub), of which Mastodon is the biggest player. Being the biggest player allows Mastodon to call some shots about how certain conventions work, because everyone wants to be compatible with it.

However, even if Mastodon somehow morphed into a corporate entity or shut down as a project or something, it would not be able to prevent:

A) People migrating to other parts of the network with all their contacts

B) the operation of the wider network

I guess this is a good example of being an excellent journalist and yet have technical blinders. If Mastodon gets near the reach of Facebook, it will not be through the will of a single entity like Facebook or Twitter did, but through the work of hundred of thousands of independent server operators federating horizontally.

The only extent this could be remotely true would be if the Mastodon.social server itself got near Facebook's reach, but they have nowhere near the sufficient infrastructure to get to that point, both financially, technically or humanly. And this is a good thing.