I think you're being overly negative, the guy is an asshole but he did push through some important milestones. Tesla achieved the scale it has today because of him, how is Rivian doing or any of the other electric up starts? And the right kind of rocket explosion is sometimes a success, in the case of spacex it's putting money towards and objective and advancing faster than whatever was being done until now with the usual military aerospace contractors just sucking tax money while delivering little to no progress.
The concrete flying was just dumb but that sometimes happens, the challenger space shuttle was lost because of some o-rings that they knew would probably fail but the information wasn't communicated well enough through the chain of people involved. And besides, we see him doing his pr thing but actual engineers went ahead with the idea of not having exhaust venting on the launch pad, it's not like is doing all if any engineering day to day decisions (he's "known" to be very involved but I gather most of that is pr bullshit)
Raising, and keeping, money from the 2012 to 2018 era was way easier in the declining interest rate environment. A door was open in 2014 (launch of Model 3 factory) that's unavailable to other companies who are just getting their start today.
Which is fine, I don't think we should go back to 0% interest rates for another decade. Too many bullshit artists (Theranos, Cryptocoins, Wework, etc. etc.) have sprung up because we purposefully ran our economy too hot with too many bullshit ideas.
But the bullshit artist who just doubles-downs with hopes to raise more money next year is over. Its not like 2012 where you can waste $4 Billion on an insane project and use that reputation to raise $6 Billion next year. Everyone's cutting back, finally, because we've run into the limits of our 0% interest rate scheme. We're finally forced to raise interest rates to 5%+, and the bullshit artists all around are panicing because of it.
EDIT: Remember jet.com? The company that "Beat" Amazon.com's growth by simply offering 10% deals on all items? They bought from Amazon, shipped it to their warehouse. Took the item out, put it into a Jet.com box and shipped it to you. Congrats, if you were stupid enough to make companies like this in 2014, you got bought out and turned into a billionaire. Life ain't gonna be like this in our lifetime ever again.
-----------
Twitter itself was part of this panic. Its why they accepted the $44 Billion buyout (which was
below the stock price / market cap IIRC, or at least not as much of a premium as people expected) in March 2022. They saw the writing on the wall and the issues with the rising interest rate environment / inflation and wanted to get out before this problem occurred. Better to sell the company and make it someone else's problem.
Similarly, SpaceX is going to have issues moving forward. And Tesla. You can't just perpetually raise equity and/or bonds anymore. 5%+ interest rates have made everything harder.
Till he got the boot, lol.
