I'm inclined to believe this is true. The problem is that Twitter's challenges are social/political, not technical, and Musk has demonstrated little competence in this area.
This is the absolute root of what's going on, right here. Twitter is only nominally a tech company; it's a media company. It may be that he had to cut the fat over there, I don't take issue with that necessarily (though I certainly do take issue with the disrespectful way he went about it), but image is incredibly important at a media company and he's notoriously bad at comms except with a small subset of people. Twitter needs sensible policy and thoughtful communication, and he wants to ram his ideology through it like he would shake up any technical process.
Another area where Musk's "brilliance" has faltered is in his transportation ideas and there's a connection here to twitter in that the challenges here again are not technical, but rather political around land use.
Brute forcing a problem with better technology not always the actual solution when technical problems aren't actually the problem.