He doesn't care about anything or anybody other than himself, and will do and say whatever benefits himself in each situation. He has no morals and no principles.
I think he just approached Twitter like he approached building electric cars or rockets. The latter are both a series of (admittedly very hard) engineering and technical challenges to solve with few, if any, gnarly social or political issues to navigate other than those which inevitably arise in any growing or large company. The hard problems are all engineering and technical (probably regulatory too, in fairness). There will be a lot of failures along the way but, most of the time (barring things that are physically impossible, or orders of magnitude beyond current cutting edge manufacturing techniques), you can brute force your way through - or find an alternative approach - with enough R&D effort/money and enough smart people.
But Twitter is nothing like this: it's all about the people, the politics, the social aspects, and simply having an end goal in sight and pushing hard towards it isn't going to get you to where you want to go - in fact, where you want to go may not even be possible due to different cultural and legal constraints around the globe. No disrespect to any engineers at Twitter but the code and infrastructure aren't the hard parts of that business at all.
I don't know that I'd describe him as unprincipled, but he is perhaps quite naive along certain axes. I think this is actually relatively common amongst very successful people who haven't experienced that much in the way of substantial failure: they can be really bad at dealing with choppy waters when they arise (I've seen this from quite close quarters, as it happens) because it sort of deconstructs who they think they are. And you really only learn who you are when the going is tough.
Every time he tweaks the rules and "crashes" twitter, a bunch of people leave, build a new network elsewhere, and never come back. Or are permanently banned and can't appeal through the back channel like pg.
(edit: the @garius "trust thermocline" concept is a good elaboration https://twitter.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904 )
> I think he just approached Twitter like he approached building electric cars
aren't tesla systematically overconfidently marketed self-driving car capabilities which caused fatalities proving P's point?
Not sure why it should be different for a company like Twitter dependant on global access.
A much (much) larger proportion of the hard work with Tesla was on vehicle development. Just look at the story of the development of the original roadster, which started out in concept as a modified Lotus Elise, but ended up being basically a completely reengineered car, and the reengineering was made that much more difficult by starting from an existing platform rather than from scratch with a clean slate.
With Twitter you have a clumsily handled set of layoffs, with lots of talk about Musk wanting to see code samples from engineers (and frankly way too much talk about Twitter's engineering in general), carried out in front of an already more-politicised-than-the-general-population userbase, features retired, introduced, withdrawn, etc., and in general lots of thrashing around. And all of this in view of an entire audience with a greater-than-the-general-population bias towards kicking off and taking matters viral.
Tesla started small: Twitter was already (relatively) a giant company with thousands of employees. It's just a fundamentally less "make it soable" situation than a small, primarily engineering focussed, car startup.
This is the only difference I spot, meaning no one was oversighting his internal management of the company. His inputs went live into operations as if they were tweets.