Sorry, but I really hate this argument. It buys into the bullshit mythology that Musk is some kind of evil genius and not just an egotistical moron.

The fact is that Elon went to court, at great expense, to try to get out of buying Twitter. It was a stupid mistake, and one that he was desparately trying to undo, right up until the last moment. To claim that this was part of his genius plan would be like saying that a good first step in planning a murder is to call the cops and tell them you’re planning a murder.

He got into his mess because he’s a sad divorced loser whose trans daughter won’t speak to him anymore, and rather than do any soul searching about it he blamed Twitter for turning her into a “communist”. He got sucked into the manosphere bullshit about how all the “woke” Silicon Valley companies are “censoring” people, tried to strongarm Twitter into changing their policies on hate speech by threatening to buy out the company if they didn’t accede, tried to make the threat credible by tendering an actual offer that was, incredibly stupidly, far above what the company was worth, and then went all surprised Pikachu face when the shareholders of a company that has literally never been profitable said “That sounds great, we’ll take it.” Now he’s just doing the best he can with a bad situation, after every legal move he could come up with to escape that situation failed ( did you know he’s even suing the lawyers who won the case for Twitter against him?).

It’s also important to understand that Elon took Twitter private. That means its profits (there aren’t any, there never have been) flow directly into his pocket, and it’s deficits flow directly out of his pocket. This isn’t like with Tesla where he’s a CEO of a publicly traded company, and get can get paid big bucks even when they lose money.

If Twitter loses money, Elon loses money. And in order to raise the capital he needed to buy it, he had to take out significant loans. In order to pay the interest on those loans he’s been liquidating large amounts of his Tesla stock (which forms the bulk of his compensation as Tesla CEO), which is tanking the Tesla stock price, which further reduces his capital.

In all this debacle has lost Elon somewhere in the region of $200 billion dollars in net worth. There is absolutely no universe in which he is personally sacrificing that kind of capital just to kill a social media platform, and even if you still - against all reason - believe this was an evil scheme to kill Twitter, it’s painfully obvious that they (whoever “they” are) could have done it for a LOT less than $200 billion.

All the changes he’s made to Twitter since buying it are driven by two basic motivations; because he’s a bigot who loves the adoration of other bigots, and because he genuinely thinks these are good ideas. Twitter is called X now because Musk has been trying to make X.com a thing for his entire adult life, to the point where its exactly what got him pushed out of PayPal.

There’s no grand plan here. He really is just that stupid.