I think he did want to buy since the beginning. He's got bigger plans for it beyond short messages. The free speech thing is just marketing.
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.
Users are what gives it value, but users are here for the app, not for the brand. That's what Metasbook seems to have forgotten when making Instagram look like TikTok. If people want TikTok, they will go to TikTok, not to Instagram.
Elon Musk's big plan is simply to build a huge personality cult around him and Twitter is perfect for that.
It's not enough for him to be exceptionally rich, he wants to be adulated.
He wants to hear he is the new Steve Jobs, that he is better than Leonardo Da Vinci. That he got this right, we are living in a computer simulation.
Why do everyone keeps assuming he is playing 10 dimensional chess?
Have you seen his dumb tunnel under Las Vegas? Why would a brilliant engineer build that? What's the big plan here?
Best I got was, experience with tunnel boring machines would be really useful for Marian and Lunar colonies.
Now though? Well, now I think it was always merely the billionaire equivalent of me picking up Blender, modelling half a spaceship before I get bored, quit, and forget I even have Blender installed for another six months.
That being said I absolutely don't think he's playing 10D chess, he's got a few big Ws and it's gone to his head in a disastrous way. He can be a brilliant engineer/engineering manager and a total fucking idiot at the same time.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAtLTLiqNwg [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw
The dumb tunnel makes me think Elon Musk is fully insulated from reality. Nobody around him dared to tell him the tunnel was dumb. And or he didn't listened.
Fast forward today where he decides on a whim that every engineer must stop working remotely and must instead work like crazy to satisfy his ego. And here again the feedback from reality seems minimal on him.
I think and I hope that the good engineers at Twitter are making plans to leave this terrible boss ASAP.
Notice how He re-discovers everything that people were saying about running a social media? I think His hands on micromanager approach is good for finding a solution through iteration. Of course, if a solution exists.
It is like going back to the basics and look at the situation with a fresh eye and understand why something doesn't work, create a solution and try again if the solution doesn't work.
This works well in a startup whose business position is a kind of blank slate and you have lots of VC money compared to you run rate, but when your existing business relies on established trust in the market, uninformed blind rapid iteration that harms brand position and existing relationships adds additional problem while you are exploring the solution space for the preexisting problem.
So if I worked at Twitter and was not on the list of people he thought he needed to fire after reviewing swiftly millions of lines of code, I would make plans to leave ASAP
What reality indicates - to me - is he wants to integrate financial services on Twitter.