Twitter didn't have this management layer, and we have now seen the result.
A family friend who works closely with Elon at SpaceX puts it like, "you have to make him believe that your technical conclusions and recommendations are actually his to have any hope of traction." Otherwise, even if you're proven right years later when Elon's strategy fails, he will hold you to task for, "not convincing him hard enough."
Twitter was pretty awfully run even before he bought it. Their business metrics were absolute crap for a business of their scale and in the pandemic environment.
The jury is still out if new Twitter has failed or not.
That's a lot harder to do with a giant debt crushing your soul, by a guy who can't really put any extra money into it to give it runway. All of the changes Elon has made to twitter have been desperate attempts to get some cash to stay alive, because the company is in a desperate position. At one point, they were down something like 50% in ad spend. Not many places can survive with new billions in debt and half the revenue. I don't know if he has been able to convince advertisers to come back, but they are fickle, stupid, and have no memory so surely that's a possibility, and this new CEO might be an attempt to convince advertisers his hands are off the wheel.
What metrics are you looking at? Pre-Musk Twitter didn't seem that badly run - it was profitable outside of a one-time court judgment.
If your mature social media site that’s been around for over a decade and has hundreds of millions of users has a 1% margin and effectively lost money in 2020, you’re not a well-run organization.
To give you an idea of their incompetence, when you create a Twitter Ads account, you’re asked to choose your time zone. I’m in UTC+5:30. Except you can’t choose half hour increments, so I was forced to choose UTC+5:00. All the data and reports had the time error.
My time zone is home to over 1.4 billion people.
If your billion dollar corporation that depends on ads can’t even be bothered to fix the time zone selection for 1/6th of the world’s population in its flagship product, its not a well-run business.
Tesla is relatively simple: you've got to make cool cars. They have to work and people have to want to buy them.
SpaceX is relatively simple: you've got to make rockets. They have to work, and be cheaper than the competition.
With Twitter it seems he doesn't understand that there's nothing to build really. The software's already there. Twitter's main job is purely social, trying to please a whole bunch of governments and advertising agencies, as well as understanding why people post there and how to make them post more. There's no straightforward technical test to it, it's a delicate social balancing problem, and one awfully ill-suited to Musk's typical "move fast and break things" approach.
Also, he claimed Twitter was losing millions per day and that's why he had to fire everyone, when in reality, the millions per day in loses were interest on the loan he'd used to buy Twitter. So he created the problem, and then blamed that. Pretty shocking.