His other companies literally have "handlers" for him so he doesn't fuck everything up, redirect his attention, etc

Twitter doesn't, so when he spouts a stupid idea they just start doing it

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." —Robert J. Hanlon

More likely, Musk drank his own kool-aid and makes snap decisions believing he's a genius that will invariably succeed, and no one is able to talk him out of his own hubris.

I still believe that he is running it into the ground out of a combination of childish pride and demands from his authoritarian financiers in Saudi Arabia.

He wanted the platform dismantled or reduced to his personal echo chamber because people were making fun of him and he couldn’t do much about it, and the regime wanted the platform under control because free communication is dangerous to their rule.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

He probably wanted to make space for more data by simulating an "accident" to avoid paying for more memory.

Why is everyone so confident that Musk can't be this stupid and incompetent?

Have you never had a clueless manager or higher up?

That's what happens when you're so powerful that you only have bootlicking yes-men around you that applaud every stupid of your ideas. At that point everyone trying to tell you that you're wrong in some way looks like the weird one.

I'm thinking it's what red states are doing. Cutting their nose off to spite the left, so they leave.

Unlike his other ventures, Twitter was already in decline. Trump and his outrage machine was the only thing propping up the aging, relevancy-challenged platform. And in the rest of his endeavors he had competent people managing around him - an isolation and filter layer - that he's decided he doesn't need or want at X.