This. First and foremost, Twitter's product was never its software but its users, and people who remark cynically about this in every other instance ("If you're not paying for the product, you're the product.") seem to have forgotten the maxim when blinded by politics or celebrities. There are plenty of start-up Twitter/FB clones, like Tribel and Gab, but none of them have a large userbase. Twitter's is big and international, despite whatever demographic quirks it may have. Musk bought Twitter for its userbase.

Musk has already said that he more or less intends to turn Twitter into a global WeChat, an all-in-one app that does payment, micro-apps, social media, video, etc. The steps he's taken already, even in the short period he's owned Twitter, point to that. He's already integrating payments by getting people to pay $8 for a blue check, which means payment validation of identity; there's a way to turn your Twitter avatar into an NFT, but only if you attach your crypto wallet—logical next steps are to turn Twitter into a payment platform, get people to order food over it, verify identity and attach online identities to financial records, develop a financial/speech surveillance system, and pretty soon you have WeChat 2.0 but with the NSA lurking in the shadows instead of China's equivalent. He can't get to that point without existing users.