> Twitter won't make enough money to service it's debt
This isn't (necessarily) true. While buying Twitter seems like a stupid investment if you want to make money, it's financials[1] very obviously point to streamlining which would make the debt serviceable.
In 2021 Twitter spent USD$1.2 billion on "Research and Development". Think about number - when did Twitter actually substantially change the platform? In their financial report this is recorded as essentially all salaries, and is separate from their server/operational expenses and salaries.
So right out the gate, the roughly $1 billion interest payments you take on buying it the way Musk is can be handled by essentially dropping that department which observably seems to have produced nothing Twitter needs to operate (you can even keep 15% of it to have some R&D). Stories like this tend to support the idea that their R&D is a drag and should go: https://twitter.com/n8agrin/status/1518860754757189632?s=21&...
Now, all that being the case - it's still a bad purchase, because every single one of their user acquisition graphs show that Twitter is very near saturation - their user growth has been slowing in a conventional looking sigmoid curve where they've probably hit the maximum market size. This is not a company you'd want to buy, because the purchase price doesn't justify any reasonable expectation of future growth (Twitter's 30 million US users are pretty much all they'll ever have).
Except: it's probably not a bad purchase if you happen to own a vastly overvalued car company which represents a huge amount of on paper wealth, and would like to liquidate that somehow. And this is (I suspect) Musk's actual goal - or part of it. Twitter is well-established and not going anywhere - I'm embedding tweet's in this very post! It's just not growing. But if Musk were want to sell say, 40 billion of Tesla stock, the likely outcome would be that it would turn out to be worth half or less of that number and the valuation would collapse. Whereas using Tesla stock to buy Twitter - key to supporting Tesla's valuation anyway via it's memestock status (price goes up based on him, personally, tweeting about stuff).
Using Tesla stock to buy Twitter doesn't look like you're selling out of Tesla because you think it's overvalued, it looks like a crazy billionaire buying Twitter so he can keep posting and "oh lol how funny". But buying Twitter, saying you'll "fix Twitter" (which you can - firing a 1000 people suddenly means other then the debt, Twitter looks profitable now) - and then liquidating your stake in Twitter, let's you cash out without necessarily burning Tesla (as it is, Tesla holders are concerned anyway - acting/being crazy has its own drawbacks).
tl;dr Musk tends to look crazy, and might be crazy but his actions have plenty of rational underpinnings.
[1] https://investor.twitterinc.com/financial-information/annual...