> Cutting costs in a company that's almost never been profitable is failure? A huge layout isn't a suggestion of an unhealthy start, it's a suggestion of an unhealthy status quo.

Maybe? It's not just that's an early layoff. It's that it is an early layoff of a huge magnitude. Again, a 50% layoff means that the previous status quo had upwards of 100% redundancy. That is unbelievable for any company, no matter how unprofitable. (I could believe it of a very profitable company with money to "waste", but a publicly traded company getting asked every quarter why they aren't profitable yet? I can't believe it. If it were that simple to cut overhead, shareholders would have demanded it years ago.) Feel free to give Musk the benefit of the doubt and assume Twitter really was that unhealthy. I feel there's a lot more reason to be skeptical here.

> What material business failings has Elon had so far that you would include in him failing upwards? Is Tesla and SpaceX successful despite Elon's bad decisions, and if so, what were those bad decisions?

I may be a bit hyperbolic claiming that the Peter Principle must especially apply to billionaires.

But, it is entirely possible to believe that Musk succeeded entirely on luck and his decisions didn't matter (for good or bad) in the long run. EVs were a huge gamble 15 years ago, but it also didn't take that much of a crystal ball to know that they were "the future". Space is always a giant gamble and the most successful always seem to just be the luckiest. (That was one of Heinlein's hypotheses early in the space race. I think a lot of sci-fi writers still believe it to be true today. Admittedly sci-fi writers don't have the most hard data to prove/disprove such a hypothesis, but it is still a useful hypothesis.)

None of that requires "proving" that the companies were successful "despite" Musk. I think there is evidence of some questionable business model practices, too (and there's plenty on Musk's business decisions out there to find; it's not "new" criticism), and I have provided some of it in at least one other thread, but at the end of the day: when you are judging someone based on the number of poker chips they have on the table, it's fair to question if it was all just random luck, especially when that someone is also acting a bit as the Dealer and getting a chunk of House money too.