Musk's skills are pretty domain-specific and not, I think, transferable. He really excels at:
1. Choosing hard (and inspiring) problems that decompose down to a series of relatively linear engineering challenges;
2. Getting large amounts of investment money from the market or government sources to fund development;
3. Yelling at engineers to solve problems (and remaining close enough to engineering to identify the specific problems to yell about), often through overwork, while keeping the core mission inspiring enough to reduce churn;
4. Cutting corners in order to productionize faster than more risk-conscious competitors.
In other words, Musk is very good at steering organizations through certain kinds of complicated challenges. But he's also terrible at complex challenges, where the path isn't linear and yelling at engineers isn't enough to unstick the process, or where cutting corners is going to be disfavored by the market or by regulators.
Twitter is by its nature a horribly complex, poorly-understood, highly-dynamic complex system that will react unpredictably to any interaction. The decisions Musk needs to make aren't engineering-based (except when it comes to slashing staff and yelling at the survivors to work harder), but open-ocean strategy: product design; market fit; and playing nice with the userbase, high-profile accounts, and advertisers. Unfortunately, Musk has never demonstrated an ability to succeed in these areas -- consider SolarCity, which held a commanding lead early on, but had to be acquired by Tesla due to debt and growth problems, and has fallen to a tiny fraction of the market due to poor sales strategy and customer complaints. Add on the fact that he has a very narrow critical path to profitability (he bought a barely-profitable entity and loaded it up with a cool $1bn/year in debt payments that will need to come out of expenses), and there's more than can go wrong at Twitter than right.
Beyond that, Musk's problem with Twitter is simply that he looked at his social media experience and assumed that it was reflective of Twitter's userbase as a whole. But the alt-right instigators, bots, crypto-enthusiasts, and general (to be frank) weirdos that developed a parasocial relationship with his account are a tiny fraction of a fraction of Twitter's population; even if we consider "political" Twitter as a whole, it's tiny, just loud since it's populated by people with media megaphones. Most Twitter users have much more normal hobbies: sports, pop culture, videogames, whatever, and with Musk catering to his followers (who he seems to think are much bigger and more valuable than they are), their experiences are likely to get a lot worse. So unless he's willing to act more like a normal social media mogul -- aggressively mute the communities that create undesirable experiences for other users, turn down the personality volume on public communications, and suck up to the ad agencies and advertisers who keep the lights on -- I don't expect Twitter to get more successful.
1. Choosing hard (and inspiring) problems that decompose down to a series of relatively linear engineering challenges;
2. Getting large amounts of investment money from the market or government sources to fund development;
3. Yelling at engineers to solve problems (and remaining close enough to engineering to identify the specific problems to yell about), often through overwork, while keeping the core mission inspiring enough to reduce churn;
4. Cutting corners in order to productionize faster than more risk-conscious competitors.
In other words, Musk is very good at steering organizations through certain kinds of complicated challenges. But he's also terrible at complex challenges, where the path isn't linear and yelling at engineers isn't enough to unstick the process, or where cutting corners is going to be disfavored by the market or by regulators.
Twitter is by its nature a horribly complex, poorly-understood, highly-dynamic complex system that will react unpredictably to any interaction. The decisions Musk needs to make aren't engineering-based (except when it comes to slashing staff and yelling at the survivors to work harder), but open-ocean strategy: product design; market fit; and playing nice with the userbase, high-profile accounts, and advertisers. Unfortunately, Musk has never demonstrated an ability to succeed in these areas -- consider SolarCity, which held a commanding lead early on, but had to be acquired by Tesla due to debt and growth problems, and has fallen to a tiny fraction of the market due to poor sales strategy and customer complaints. Add on the fact that he has a very narrow critical path to profitability (he bought a barely-profitable entity and loaded it up with a cool $1bn/year in debt payments that will need to come out of expenses), and there's more than can go wrong at Twitter than right.
Beyond that, Musk's problem with Twitter is simply that he looked at his social media experience and assumed that it was reflective of Twitter's userbase as a whole. But the alt-right instigators, bots, crypto-enthusiasts, and general (to be frank) weirdos that developed a parasocial relationship with his account are a tiny fraction of a fraction of Twitter's population; even if we consider "political" Twitter as a whole, it's tiny, just loud since it's populated by people with media megaphones. Most Twitter users have much more normal hobbies: sports, pop culture, videogames, whatever, and with Musk catering to his followers (who he seems to think are much bigger and more valuable than they are), their experiences are likely to get a lot worse. So unless he's willing to act more like a normal social media mogul -- aggressively mute the communities that create undesirable experiences for other users, turn down the personality volume on public communications, and suck up to the ad agencies and advertisers who keep the lights on -- I don't expect Twitter to get more successful.