I think his idea is that Twitter as a pure diffusion platform is dead and/or insufficient, as shown by the competition meta is going to bring in the market with

I think his idea is that Twitter as a pure diffusion platform is dead and/or insufficient, as shown by the competition meta is going to bring in the market with Threads. His vision is that the west needs/wants a mega app - WeChat like - where you can communicate privately or publicly; interact with people / communities / companies and pay / exchange money. Do not forget that his wealth initially came from changing the way people pay online, he's got a thing for that kind of market. To create that mega app; you can either start from scratch (hard) or flip an existing product. Ideally such a product would need to have a massive audience (network effect) and at least part of the feature your mega app needs. Amongst the available platforms; TikTok was too big/expensive and targeted at minors. Meta and all their properties is too expensive. Twitter was the next on this list that was kinda aligned. It was loosing money (so not "too" expensive even if he arguably overpaid it); got a ton of (adult) customers; and communication already provided. Engineering wise; twitter was known in SV as a place to "vest and rest". So he immediately put a stop to it and made the team leaner. As the saying go: "If you want to go fast; go alone. If you want to go far; go together". It looks like Musk wants to go fast right now. He seems to believe that there is hundreds (if not thousands) of billions of valuation waiting for the first company that would become the western world WeChat. If he is right; then the 44 billions he paid for Twitter were just a way to kickstart the project; just like he did by turning Tesla from a so-so company to a global leader (depending on the metric you look like). Using his fame definitely would have drawn interest to X.com; but that alone isn't enough. Google itself failed multiple time to launch social networks despite their fame (Google +; Google Wave; ...). But if tomorrow he launches a "Send money to" feature in twitter, he will already have far more user in 24h) than everything he could have hoped for had he done it otherwise. And that might be worth those 44B. Or he just fails miserably to deliver on the vision; he also had his failures (the boring company being an obvious one).