Musk is deliberately undermining Twitter because his GOP pals think Twitter was an important tool that liberals used to resist and defeat Trump in '20 and '22. (As I’ve said elsewhere.)
Musk wants people to mistake his deliberate sabotage for innocent mismanagement. But his actions somehow always damage the parts of Twitter that made it a reasonably effective way for honest, sober people to communicate and organize:
“It’s disappointing because it undermines an important data signal that was valuable to the audience.”
I agree with @tindalos:
once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action
The $40B isn’t a big loss: Musk probably knows better than anybody that a substantial amount of that wealth was fictional, destined to simply evaporate in one of the economic calamities that will necessarily result from hard-right socioeconomic policy, or (god willing) be confiscated by a possible Warren-style government. And he’s still outrageously wealthy. This way, he actually gets some use out of the money, and he probably gets to cheat the Tax Man while doing so.