An estimated $4 to $20 billion in value, what is he thinking?
Any user who loves Elon Musk enough to continue using “X” for the foreseeable future would have certainly joined him on a new social media platform anyway. That’s how cults of personality work.
Meanwhile, most of the normal and sane people who regularly used Twitter before have decreased or totally stopped their use of the platform since Elon Musk took over and started it on its current death spiral.
I’m sure you’re right, that he bought Twitter for its userbase (and, maybe more importantly, the data), but the grave miscalculation that both he and you are making is that the userbase is not hostage to his whims. People have left to Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, etc., more are leaving everyday, and more will continue to leave until the site is no longer worth the cost of maintaining and Elon shuts it down or sells it off.
He could have spent a fraction of that $44B making and marketing a new platform, and it probably would have gone a lot better for him than this shitshow. It’s not 4-D chess… Dude bought an unprofitable, overvalued company at the absolute worst time and then proceeded to alienate the majority of him users and advertisers while absolutely destroying the brand.
That’s not how the network effect works. A large, established, functioning network has immense value that is very difficult to erode.