he paid 41B for the user base

not for infrastructure, as twitter did not have its own servers - BTW, the dependency on Big Tech clouds is another leverage the deep state has over X

not for the code - most of the code was censorship, "trending", data mining and focused ads calculations.

not for the employees - he dismissed most of them.

From the beginning Musk declared to have big ambitions - not just tweets, a broad app with everything from blogs to shopping.

Did he believe the user base was the key to get quicker results?

He would have to create an open source + open protocol business model... Possible?

At the $$ scale Elon Musk would care about? What about other clients competing for users?

Heck, I am not even sure how many of the usual proprietary social networks are really profitable without selling user data and deep state subsides (there are very dark tales)