SpaceX and Tesla made affordable, reusable rockets, and affordable, high performance electric cars with a long range. Those things have obvious value, but required solving big engineering challenges to make them a reality. Musk doesn't seem to have any clear goal with twitter. There are vague ideas about making it subscription-funded rather than advertising-funded, and about having less censorship, but neither are things the majority of people want.
I imagine the site will mostly continue to more-or-less work, despite all the layoffs. They still have thousands of staff. The network effect of Twitter is so big that people will continue to use it even if fail whales become more common. Others suggest that it will soon crash and burn, or that Musk will get bored and sell it for a few billion. Or that Musk is a genius who will make some sort of amazing Twitter 2.0 that does for social media what Tesla did for electric cars. But without any appealing long term vision, and with an owner who bought it to satisfy their ego rather than with any real plan, the reality may be more boring. I imagine it will just languish for many years, with occasional manufactured drama, and occasional downtime, but no real innovation. Maybe to be eventually supplanted by something else in 10 years or so.
> Or that Musk is a genius who will make some sort of amazing Twitter 2.0
Based on texts exposed via the lawsuit about the purchase, I don't think this is the case. I don't think he, or his advisors, understand that the product at twitter (and other social media) is content moderation. You can have a vision of whatever type of content or pricing scheme you want but without solid content moderation you will lose advertisers, gain lawsuits (people were posting movies the other day) and lose users because the "feed" becomes a muddied mess. Users are only really the product when you can moderate their content to have profit via advertisers.
I imagine the site will mostly continue to more-or-less work, despite all the layoffs. They still have thousands of staff. The network effect of Twitter is so big that people will continue to use it even if fail whales become more common. Others suggest that it will soon crash and burn, or that Musk will get bored and sell it for a few billion. Or that Musk is a genius who will make some sort of amazing Twitter 2.0 that does for social media what Tesla did for electric cars. But without any appealing long term vision, and with an owner who bought it to satisfy their ego rather than with any real plan, the reality may be more boring. I imagine it will just languish for many years, with occasional manufactured drama, and occasional downtime, but no real innovation. Maybe to be eventually supplanted by something else in 10 years or so.