A big falsifying hypothesis from this would be to predict that there are NOT any high-up PR staff of notable quality that have been around him for a long time.
If the PR people around him evince no particular talent for it and have been in constant flux for the duration of Musk's career such that he is the only constant, then yea, there'd probably be something to this.
Otherwise, if there is at least one person that was in his inner circle for a critical period of time that can also be said to have strong PR talent, then it's questionable ... sometimes success is having, on top of other things, the right team.
Elon had a lot of luck, no doubt, but his track record is simply impressive and for that, I think it's fair to say that he has extraordinary talent.
Sure, but it becomes hard to distinguish luck from talent. How would you know that an up and coming but talented PR person didn’t pick him? Or that was random?
It’s the major flaw with idolisation. Ends and means aren’t that tightly coupled. Against the utility of idolising someone, is the noise worth it? Ever?
That it coincided with a period of advertiser regression doesn't help.
I think we need to stop pretending that the only possible answer for seemingly misguided decisions is secret brilliance.
But I think Musk is also a good example of the reason that I would probably not work for a company whose head is a sales guy. Salespeople are great at hype, but they often do it by living in a fantasy land, and someone insufficiently connected to reality is in charge, things can get wacky. I knew of one place where the CEO was absolutely great at closing deals, but he would do it by promising more new features than the company could build. The well-meaning tech people did their best, but rushing to meet the CEO's promises meant a worse and worse code base, with bug counts skyrocketing and feature velocity slowing.
At Tesla and SpaceX, he apparently had competent people in charge to buffer his impulses and direct him toward what he's good at. But here we see that fantasy dynamic play out as he absolutely flails around trying to run a business that he doesn't really understand after firing most of the people who did and terrifying the remainder. If anything, I think the Twitter saga demonstrates that on his own, he's actually bad at a bunch of core business skills.