Prediction: Musk will buy it, Twitter will tank, Musk will sell it at a loss.
I think it was Jason Calacanis who suggested charging people for the ability to write essays on the platform. I'm not convinced some of these people even understand what Twitter is.
His life is rapidly looking like a cautionary tale about social media addiction that we should all learn from.
Twitter has its problems, but not having long-form should not philosophically be one of them, especially since it was centered around 140-280 character limits for short updates. Twitter should focus fixing the trolling, abuse & toxicity before they try fixing other things. Feature overhaul probably needed.
He seems to do quite well once he puts his focus on a problem, even if that's due to the people he ultimately decides to hire/fire.
You realize people have tried that before as well, e.g. Parler, Gab, Truth Social, etc?
You're likely right to some degree though, in so much as that there will be a group or a few who will for reasons (whether truthful or not) don't want to associate with a site owned by Musk and will try to start and create a successful site; it's not easy though - and why Musk is willing to buy a head start for ~$42 billion.
Still, an alternative wouldn't succeed.
Beyond the moderation, these sites have the problem that they are inherently set up as a sort of opposition haven -- "we're twitter for people banned from twitter!"
This results in a phenomenon Hank Green calls the "worst people problem"[0]. I'm not a huge fan of the judgemental term, but the core idea is similar to pointing out the inherent contradiction of, say, an anarchists' society. You end up with a userbase that is defined by its desire to flaunt rules and reject any normative standards.
[0]:https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1348101443404787718.html
(somewhat related and worth a watch: Folding Ideas' 2017 video essay about YT alternatives. Alt platforms have had inherent problems even before the more recent political bent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3snVCRo_bI)
If Elon owns Twitter he will attract very quality people, and he will pay them well, reward them well, and then they will be the ones doing most of the work to actually run Twitter.