> The idea that he can strategize and effect change at the fine-grained level of emergent phenomena like a picture of an internal comms channel is bonkers, conspiracy theory stuff.

You're right, but Elon himself is pushing this narrative. Remember when he pretended he was going to personally review the code of a bunch of Twitter engineers? There's also the Twitter blue pricing exchange and a number of other topics he's trying to appear deeply involved in the details for.