Depends. It's way worse now. But I think the main difference was X Premium or whatever they call now.

Basically, if you buy the verified badge, you get promoted on the algo timeline, comments, everything. And people also getting money by views...

This affects in two ways, first, not a lot of people want to give Money to elon, and the elon fans want to pay.

Second, this also makes a lot of people posting everywhere posting insane things just to get views and money.

Oh, there's also the bots that just reposts other people tweets now on the comments.

Why comments? It's how you get more views (money).