I know you're joking but I think this could legitimately be a ploy by Elon to keep Twitter in the news, which can be a big source of traffic. Pretty smart, really.
Obviously incompetent is an understatement when it comes to this whole fiasco but hear me out here: Twitter being offline and hitting the headlines probably got a lot of people to check if it was down and some of those people stuck around and got re-addicted. On the other hand, they probably lost user's attention due to the outage.