To be pedantic, USB sticks do come in TB sizes these days.
Either way though, I expect Musk, the richest man alive, can afford to pay a handful of senior engineers a couple weeks pay to store and run some analysis on the firehose. It's a lot of data, but at "fuck-you" level money it's certainly manageable.
Sure, it's manageable. I mean, trivially, Twitter manages it and Elon is worth more than Twitter, so clearly he can afford to process the data. They question is how long will it take, and how much money will he spend reproducing the analysis done by the company he's about to buy.
Either way though, I expect Musk, the richest man alive, can afford to pay a handful of senior engineers a couple weeks pay to store and run some analysis on the firehose. It's a lot of data, but at "fuck-you" level money it's certainly manageable.