I think Musk plans to change the nature of twitter. He could build a substack and onlyfans clone for starters, but i think his ultimate goal is to make it the Wechat of the US
I personally think Musk ended up with Twitter because he lost a game of chicken with Parag Agrawal, for whom there should be a marble statue erected in Bowling Green commemorating him as a hero of shareholder value. You can think otherwise. You're wrong, but it doesn't matter! We can arrive at the same analysis.
Whatever Musk's grand strategy is, his first order of business is to strip Twitter down to some efficient core. He'll want to put his own big plans in place, not Parag's. Even if you think Musk really wanted Twitter, he certainly didn't want it because he thought there was a lot of value locked up in Twitter's internal plans.
The point is just: Twitter was bound to get a bunch smaller in the near term because the first order of business here is to do a reset, and to shake off all the long-term bets Twitter was making. Public Twitter had to make those bets; otherwise, the only way to value it would be on the ad revenue it was already bringing in.
I cannot discount that Elon may have a master plan here but it did seem he was being outplayed every step of the way because he was so... Elon?