Would It have been cheaper for Elon Musk to start his own social website?

Of course it’d be cheaper. Web sites aren’t that expensive to make.

What he wanted, though, was the attention, and the web site that already had many users and, er, the brand recognition he just replaced with, er, the letter X, for some reason.

Probably just because he’d registered that one-letter domain name long ago when they were allowed to register.

Why create when you can just buy/steal someone else idea and make it yours.
The beginning of his demise.

He got disrespected so bought Twitter out of spite, fired the offenders, then tried to keep it afloat. He didn’t stop to think of the usefulness of certain staff to keep pulling in revenue or even to keep the site running properly. So now it has lost tremendous value and is his worst investment ever.

He does NOT want Twitter nor his own company anything like Twitter. He wants to DESTROY Twitter & what better way to do it than to buy it & run it in the ground???