Twitter's value was always the data and influence it had. But it was never able to capture that value and gave it away to openai and others who scraped the data and used it to help build out their LLM. And realistically, even if they had known this was happening, they would still have trouble capturing the actual value from a third party scraping its data.

But by buying it and using it to build a competitive LLM based off the data, he was able to capture the value, at least when both entities are combined.

I never thought about it this way and I'm not sure if this was the actual strategy when he bought Twitter, but it makes sense.