Yarp
I note that some people have claimed there was a roaring trade in them, in reality from what I've seen it was actually quite hard even if you were for example an actor with dozens/hundreds of credits including as the main performer on various massively popular animated series, video games and routinely a headline attraction at major events.
I can't exactly speak for his state of mind, but he certainly seemed to think it was a joke, then balked and tried to walk away after signing contracts that had many business lawyers wondering how his lawyers let him sign them...I mean he tried to fight that contract in court, which suggests he wasn't exactly as enthusiastic about buying twitter after the initial joke and publicity wore off and he started to realise what he'd done.
Social media companies have certain legal obligations, one of those is that for example they should be working with law enforcement when required to deal with criminal activity on their platforms, even the smallest commercial operations will have people who for example are meant to try and find/deal with complaints of things like CSM (large ones such as Twitter have, or in post Musk Twitter had, specific teams*), many countries also require that social media platforms take specific steps to deal with any data that may be collected in regards to children, or to restrict what children have access to.
As an example of what I mean by teams to try and find/deal with CSM, pretty much every image host or social media platform that allows people to upload images and video will fairly routinely try to do things like compare hash's of uploaded material against known hashes from CSM, and will have either people in house or specialist contractors who will review reports of such material, they will also have dedicated points of contact (usually legally required) for law enforcement so that such material can be taken down quickly and any evidence preserved or so that law enforcement can get the collected information from accounts with that material.
Musk got rid of entire teams of people in most countries outside of the US** meaning that in many cases those countries no longer have dedicated point of contact for Twitter, and no one in Twitter who speaks/understands the legal obligations for operating in that country, for example it appears twitter used to take advantage of a GDPR rule that allowed everything to go through one office, when he got rid of the Irish offices he just happened to get rid of Twitter's GDPR compliance people, and is now potentially liable to dealing with it in each individual country now (he may need some luck with that given he's also got rid of pretty much all the twitter staff in the EU).
*If nothing else it's normally considered a "very bad thing" for a company to be asked questions in the news or in front of legislators about things like "why do you allow this material" especially if they can't then point to a fairly robust, good faith effort to deal with it even if it isn't working as well as you'd hope. One of the safest or only ways to deal with that questioning is to have people who are specifically dealing with it so you can show you are at least trying (and those people are usually specialists because of what it entails).
**In the case of CSM he dumped the teams in the counties that are infamous for being hotspots in regards to it being produced and distrusted from.
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