Even before Elon Musk proposed a roughly $44 billion deal to take over Twitter, his tweeting habit had become an essential part of his public persona. He was the world’s richest person, the founder of Tesla, the SpaceX guy, and someone who would not, or could not, stop posting.

This didn’t stop when Twitter accepted his offer. Mr. Musk spent Wednesday lashing out at critics, mocking coverage of the deal, posting photos of rockets and criticizing Twitter itself, amplifying right-wing criticism of the service and singling out the company’s top lawyer. (The deal could still fall apart.)

As Mr. Musk’s Twitter use became essential to his business, it was often construed as somehow humanizing, as part of Mr. Musk’s populist appeal, or as a weakness or a vice. Andy Warhol’s observation that “no amount of money can get you a better Coke” could at times feel applicable: The man at the center of a trillion-dollar business empire, who has cultivated an identity as a bold future builder, was looking down at the same iPhone that everyone can buy, opening the same Twitter app that everyone else can download, settling scores or just deciding to post “I put the art in fart.”

This view turns Mr. Musk’s plan to purchase Twitter into a pat story: rich guy who loves Twitter decides to buy it. If this isn’t wrong, exactly, it misses two things. One is obvious: Someone with resources and interests as vast as Mr. Musk’s has plenty of practical uses for a powerful communications platform that has permeated politics, media and economic affairs; for years, Twitter has helped him get his way.

The other is less visible. While Mr. Musk taps his blue bird icon like the rest of us, the thing he actually interacts with — and now wants to control, and fix — isn’t Twitter as anyone else knows it.

Twitter has to work for the majority of people who use it, meaning people who have few followers and who rarely, if ever, tweet. It is, primarily, a service for passively consuming information — for dipping into conversations that are happening around you, and maybe joining them.

The company certainly attends to its high-profile users, who provide content that people want to follow. But beyond some point of visibility on the platform, many users outsource their presences, become risk averse and step away, or seem to lose their minds. Prominent users regularly observe how unwieldy the service becomes after 10,000, or 50,000, or 100,000 followers.

Mr. Musk has more than 85 million. This makes him the seventh most followed person on the service. According to the analytics firm SocialTracker, however, his account produces by far the most engagement of his peers.

Around the time Mr. Musk was making his offer, 1.86 percent of Mr. Musk’s followers were interacting — through likes and retweets — with his posts, according to SocialTracker. That may not sound high, but the only peer account that came close in the firm’s analysis was that of the soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo, with an interaction rate of 0.65 percent. Barack Obama’s was 0.03 percent. Katy Perry’s was 0.01 percent.

This period was full of provocations and newsworthy posts from Mr. Musk; hardly a week goes by, however, than isn’t. Mr. Musk’s engagement rate fluctuates, and among the most highly followed users, there are some who have posted more, and others who receive greater engagement on infrequent individual posts. None, however, consistently produce as much total Twitter engagement as Mr. Musk. Earlier this month, he hinted at this dynamic:

The world’s wealthiest person, in other words, might also be in possession of Twitter’s most frequently engaged account, and his influence only stands to grow. (In 2021, a different firm, Brandwatch, ranked his account as the fourth most influential on the platform.)

Mr. Musk’s singular relationship with the world around him translates to a singular relationship with Twitter, the company; its power to move markets and shape politics is plausibly worth more to him, financially, than to anybody else. His relationship with Twitter the service is, in reality, no less remote.

The material existence of billionaires is not something you can easily extrapolate from a wage-earning existence, or even from considerable wealth; they do not simply live in upgraded versions of common financial realities. Their perspectives are informed by an extraordinarily rare relationship to the world, which explains, among other things, why many billionaires tend to express similar political grievances. Their wealth also affords them plenty of space to cultivate their idiosyncratic concerns. Similarly, Mr. Musk’s Twitter isn’t simply a busier version of everyone else’s. It’s a different animal entirely.

Mr. Musk’s Twitter, much like his money, works in ways that others’ do not. He follows only 114 accounts, but his tweets usually receive tens of thousands of replies apiece, and often many more. He opens his Twitter app to what is quite likely the busiest notifications tab on the entire service, representing millions of words directed at him, largely about him.

With each pull of a thumb, the tab algorithmically replenishes from a pool of more new posts than a single human could possibly hope to read. It’s a Twitter that is too busy and overloaded to resemble Twitter as most people know it, with every possible notification bubble eternally reading “99+.”

Twitter, for the majority of users, is a place to follow people and maybe post. For a smaller group of users, it’s a place to try to amass a following. For someone in Mr. Musk’s position, “it’s like he’s texting the world,” said Jake Updegraff, a celebrity social media manager with experience running large Twitter accounts.

With a large enough audience, Mr. Updegraff said, “it’s like a whole forum under everything you post.” It’s an on-demand portal to the center of a media galaxy, in which a regular feed of information is replaced with an infinite stream of people addressing you by name. For the right sort of person, few things could be more intoxicating (or more debilitating).

The ways in which Mr. Musk has leveraged Twitter for real-world power are measured with different tools, and on a different scale, than whatever clout he has been able to accumulate within the platform. They’re what will matter most in the future, to him and to the rest of us. Mr. Musk plainly sees value in what Twitter already does and in what it has allowed him to do, and his desire to protect or extend those qualities could have serious consequences well beyond the platform.

For decoding Mr. Musk’s claims about how Twitter may change, his experience with the platform could be instructive. He has used Twitter to promote his companies — Tesla in particular, but also SpaceX, the Boring company and others — and relentlessly attack his critics and competitors.

His tweets have triggered tens of billions of dollars of trading activity. Last May, after Mr. Musk posted that Tesla no longer planned to accept Bitcoin, CNBC estimated that he had briefly wiped up to $365 billion from cryptocurrency markets; likewise, his musings on Dogecoin have contributed to major spikes in its price.

But the essential strangeness of his time on Twitter itself will matter, too. A man who has engaged in years of financially high-stakes Twitter exchanges, some of them with anonymous accounts, may be especially interested in “authentication.” Someone whose account receives so much inbound material as to confound Twitter’s interface, quality filters and content-sorting algorithms may assess them as broken in extremely specific ways. Someone who was fined by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for tweeting, or who watched the former president of the United States, another Twitter-obsessed billionaire, get banned from the platform, brings along some heavy baggage on an already politicized crusade to restore “free speech.”

A user whose antagonistic tweets are often followed by a wave of harassment for anyone mentioned will decide what harassment is and how it’s dealt with. A man whose Twitter experience already bent to his will may wonder why the whole thing shouldn’t work that way. And now, maybe, it will.

For Context is a column that explores the edges of digital culture.