[WJW]

Musk has had success with Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX. All of those are/were mostly engineering problems first and then marketing problems second. None of the major problems at Twitter these days are engineering problems, but rather they are all related to politics and human group psychology. I don't see what Elon could bring to the table that Twitter does not already have.

[shafyy]

PayPal wasn't rally an engineering problem, at least not at the scale of Tesla and SpaceX.

I'm torn. I think he has some good ideas (more open, paid vs. ads, crack down on bots), and for sure the necessary leadership to focus resources on those topics. On the other hand, it's not good that rich people own more media.

[kylecordes]

For PayPal to succeed it had to viciously hammer on a huge number of users who it algorithmically suspected might maybe be scammers. Blocking a tremendous amount of free activity in the process, punishing many innocent in addition to the guilty. This was done to create something that felt safe enough to get mainstream use.

That sounds somewhat like the Twitter of today, and not much like a hypothetical super-free-ified twitter.