What's with the second guessing of Elon's motivations as some kind of clever ploy? Let's consider the possibility that this just isn't his cup of tea and he's acting stupid beyond reason.
If you asked me to perform brain surgery on someone I'd first refuse, then if you pointed a gun at me I hope I would probably still refuse but on the off chance that I did not I think I would have more success than Elon has at formulating a social media policy that has a fighting chance of working. This just isn't an engineering problem and bringing an engineering mindset to it ("let's fix the bugs and plug the holes") is going to make things much worse even than doing nothing.
For this to work you need to have a fairly broad understanding of social affairs, a high degree of empathy and an ability to work with a team of people who may disagree with you on key points. Musk does not seem to have any of these to a sufficient degree (to be polite) to make this happen.
I agree and would go one step further: every company is a social endeavor. There is no such thing as "an engineering company". The likes of Musk are wholy incapable of successfully running such endeavors when "success" is broadened to include more factors other than money and technical engineering feats.
If you asked me to perform brain surgery on someone I'd first refuse, then if you pointed a gun at me I hope I would probably still refuse but on the off chance that I did not I think I would have more success than Elon has at formulating a social media policy that has a fighting chance of working. This just isn't an engineering problem and bringing an engineering mindset to it ("let's fix the bugs and plug the holes") is going to make things much worse even than doing nothing.
For this to work you need to have a fairly broad understanding of social affairs, a high degree of empathy and an ability to work with a team of people who may disagree with you on key points. Musk does not seem to have any of these to a sufficient degree (to be polite) to make this happen.