Maybe this is what he means by a “total rewrite”.
Musk: "I think we won't get to the refactor if we don't make these changes"
"why?"
Musk: "because we're going to be bankrupt"
"what's the runway?"
Musk: *silence*
"Elon you're you're our philosopher um you know Plato would be very proud of you. You're extremely technically competent and I think really understand how to how to drive things in a in a good direction. You know I I really love how you're also leaning into the voice of the people and letting you know them have a say as well *but*..."
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/z2ofwk/i_wa...
Ooh, a tough question, but a fair one.
This is why experienced engineers don't just act out on first instinct.
Apparently there had been an architecture diagram by Holz that people are aware of and I can only imagine it to be a mammoth.
The laughing heard when Musk mentioned the diagram came from Holz's direction mostly I think at a) the aggressive provocative tone of Brown and b) his hilarious "questions" directly trying to put Musk on the spot about this mammoth tech stack. Everybody knows that just naming things in this 1000+ items diagram won't help anybody but Brown's ego.
Do it! And GPL the stack you leave for dead please, Elon.
Rewriting software from scratch isn't cheap, either, especially if you're doing it at the same time as trying to keep the existing code base running. It's practically never a good idea.
But even if it were worth rewriting the software, it's still not what he paid for. He paid $44B because the software is so famous that we're talking about it here, and that would last even through a rewrite. (Assuming the rewrite was done correctly, which it usually isn't.)