The invite-only launch was a selling point. "It's a exclusive service, but if you score an invite, you might have a casual chat with a bunch of billionaires and SV bigwigs."
This may be surprising to people in Palo Alto but 99.9% of regular working people have nothing to say to billionaires and SV influencers, outside of maybe some profanities. There's no way a product with that as the premise would have had a future outside of its ivory tower niche.
Despite it's origins, ivory tower means, in the sense of being out of touch with common people, academia. It does not mean being out of touch because rich or nobility.