If he does, there will be a significant share premium paid to current holders from the acquirer.
If you don’t care about directly making money, you can treat the platform as a way to promote or reject whatever messaging you want to millions of users.
If it’s a public company, it’d be subject to the will of the shareholders and have other corporate responsibilities. If it’s private, it can do whatever he wants it.
There is nothing that says a public company must only be motivated by growth. Tesla's mission statement doesn't say anything of the sort and has done things that don't fulfill the idea of growth or profit at all costs.
Now you might argue that institutional investors don't care about that since there's an indirection between actual shareholders, but that's a related but different issue.
Also I bet they would call to regulate or even nationalize social media platforms as soon as companies like Twitter switch to a more balanced moderation approach and don't aid in amplifying certain politics.
It would be called something else that would be easily to remember like Tikker or Woobly.
Musk has to take care to not overplay his hand.
But trying to shut down a platform which is considered (by some) "critical infrastructure" might find you in a position where regulations restrict what you can do.
It's not a certainty but a possibility that this might happen (regardless of who is in power at the time.) Many politicians of different leanings use Twitter for communication.
I would argue that the drift toward extremism has much more to do with the advertising revenue business model.
Content that enrages, engages. More user engagement = more revenue.
Growth in social media means attracting more users and/or increasing engagement of existing users. Civil and reasonable discourse is bad for engagement numbers, outrage and extremism do much better.
Public companies and their leadership face much more pressure to show profit and growth every 3 months. This pushes them toward short-term thinking and easy ways to juice their numbers. For social media the easiest way to do this is the promote and encourage content that incites outrage, since this drives engagement, which in turn drives ad $$$
Don't reward Wall Street by taking it private at a fat premium for them.
Source? While it was apparently over $20B at the peak of its value, according to https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/DWAC it seems to currently be bellow $2.5B
I don't think there's much that Musk can do to increase Twitter's revenue, but at least the market seems to believe that he can hype this one beyond reasonable valuations, too.