Maybe not in the end, but he spent significant time, money, and effort in the lead-up to the acquisition. If he never wanted it at all, well, he shouldn't play those games with their board and the public =/
It's that kind of rash (and brash) thoughtlessness that seem to characterize his recent decision-making, in stark contrast to my former hero who built an entire freaking space fleet from scratch... so sad, too bad... power corrupts and all that, I guess.
That guy never existed, though. At best Musk hired a team of brilliant engineers who built a space fleet for him, and while that isn't nothing, people acted as if he was Zephram Cochrane building a warp drive out of junk in his backyard, by hand, alone. And by all accounts, he succeeds in spite of himself because his staff is able to handle and redirect his ego and bad judgement (exceptions like the Cybertruck notwithstanding.) That infrastructure just didn't exist at Twitter, where no one could stop him going buck wild.
But he's always been that guy, and I'm glad to see the edifice of Elon Musk torn down. No one deserved the kind of blind adoration and hero worship that man got, and still gets.
Elon did not want to buy Twitter. He owns it because he was about to lose litigation that would have forced him to buy it or pay what would have to be an enormous settlement - enough to make Twitter's shareholders at least as happy as him buying it. He spent $100M on lawyers before giving up.
He spent what is likely to be his most readily liquid $30Billion. That's gone now. He probably thought he could flip it and come out close to even. But now his most accessible money is gone.
That's got to leave a mark.