@rompe
I was an intern at SpaceX years ago, back it when it was a much
smaller company — after Elon got hair plugs, but before his cult of
personality was in full swing. I have some insight to offer here.

Back when I was at SpaceX, Elon was basically a child king. He was
an important figurehead who provided the company with the money,
power, and PR, but he didn’t have the knowledge or (frankly)
maturity to handle day-to-day decision making and everyone knew
that. He was surrounded by people whose job was, essentially, to
manipulate him into making good decisions.

Managing Elon was a huge part of the company culture. Even I, as a
lowly intern, would hear people talking about it openly in meetings.
People knew how to present ideas in a way that would resonate with
him, they knew how to creatively reinterpret (or ignore) his many
insane demands, and they even knew how to “stage manage” parts
of the physical office space so that it would appeal to Elon.

The funniest example of “stage management” I can remember is this
dude on the IT security team. He had a script running in a terminal on
one of his monitors that would output random garbage, Matrix-style,
so that it always looked like he was doing Important Computer
Things to anyone who walked by his desk. Second funniest was all
the people I saw playing WoW at their desks after ~5pm, who did it in
the office just to give the appearance that they were working late.

People were willing to do that at SpaceX because Elon was giving
them the money (and hype) to get into outer space, a mission people
cared deeply about. The company also grew with and around Elon.
There were layers of management between individual employees and
Elon, and those managers were experienced managers of Elon.
Again, I cannot stress enough how much of the company culture was
oriented around managing this one guy.

‘Twitter has neither of those things going for it. There is no company
culture or internal structure around the problem of managing Elon
Musk, and I think for the first time we're seeing what happens when
people actually take that man seriously and at face value. Worse,
they’re doing this little experiment after this man has had decades of
success at companies that dedicate significant resources to
protecting themselves from him, and he’s too narcissistic to realize it.