Doesn't he have enough money to just pay people to setup friendly accounts? I hate Musk's ass, but if he wants to put me on his payroll to kiss his ass on the internet, I'm for sale. $200k/year and I will sing his praises far and wide.
He's got literally no humans or animals that like him irl. He already is paying people for this job. He bought Twitter to be his friend so he could spend all his free time on there which is a lot and it won't look as weird since he owns it. Guys brain is more cooked than a nfl player with cte.
He bought Twitter because he wanted to pump the stock up, presumably so that he could dump his stock. The timeline is that Elon talked about taking Twitter private, paying 420$ per share, because 420 is the funny marijuana number. Twitter's board then agreed to the buyout, since Elon's offer was far more than what the company was actually worth. Elon tried to weasel out of the deal, but Twitter successfully sued him to force him into buying Twitter.
$200k a year could buy an entire army of bots and trolls. He doesn’t need to bother with paying individual people, when a company with borderline slave labor will do it en masse for a penny per post.
His ego is way too big for that so he needs to trick himself into strong enough cognitive dissonance and he gets that by buying people of indirectly. Tale as old as time.