I think people would have argued with him. There are people that fawn on him one day and then complain that 'the algorithm has shadowbanned them again' the next, and he spends a surprising amount of time engaging with them. It's like some weird parody of an abusive relationship, with the world's erstwhile richest man and uber-CEO earnestly and repeatedly appeasing influencers like 'Catturd.'
To an extent I think this is political theater, as opposed to ineptitude, petulance, or poor financial decision-making. Twitter is an important piece of virtual territory because it's still the platform for breaking news and pretty much every media outlet publishes and promotes stories there, as well as most politicians, govt agencies and so on. Like it or not it is the most 'realtime' mass market platform.
That gives Twitter tremendous strategic importance, even though its social graph is smaller and more ephemeral than Facebook's. Size is not everything; reach matters too. That strategic importance makes it interesting to state and non-state actors, because capture of that territory is loosely equivalent to control of radio broadcasting capacity or printing presses in earlier eras. If you think of Twitter as a magically effective print and distribution store for pamphleteers with a huge secondary ecosystem around it, the shutdown of free API access is essentially a market takeover. Musk was spitballing yesterday and suggesting that from now on API access would cost $100/month and require ID to use.
(It's interesting to me that Google could have owned that space with their News product, although it has always been a one-way thing rather than socially driven. Their failure to own that space is a direct result of their aversion to user configurability and selection.)