No, but he also didn't become a billionaire by being skilled, either. He was invested in the right companies at the right time or got big loans at the right time.
- Zip2 was the only venture he directly invested code into, and it got bought during the dot com boom for a ridiculously inflated sum to start him out.
- Next venture, X.com, was financial services and was one of the few tech segments to not crumble during the dot com crash. Confinity merged them into Paypal, but he got forced out as CEO because he was an idiot and kept trying to migrate their entire backend to Windows Server, which at the time was the tech equivalent of telling KFC to change its 11 herbs and spices into 11 fruit flavors. Paypal got bought out by eBay and he made a huge pile of cash from his company share.
- Next was SpaceX which he almost ran into the ground before finally getting something to actually reach orbit, then NASA bailed them out.
- Tesla at the same time was a nothingburger until it managed to produce a small number of cars around 2008, where it got infused with wads of cash from the US DoE. Most of his money is tied to Tesla, and most of the reason Tesla got off the ground at all was because of massive US government subsidies, low interest energy department development loans, and tax breaks for new EV purchases.
- Solarcity has been a legal and PR disaster for him ever since acquiring it and folding it into Tesla Energy. I don't think it's ever made money and it's been a huge anchor weighing down on Tesla's cash flow.
Throughout his entire career he's been stumbling from one company to the next. He's wealthy on paper but almost all of it is tied to stock options and holdings, with low liquidity or insulation from a bad class action suit, market crash or interest rate spikes. I think he's at a point where his wealth is "too big to fail", but he largely owes his success to the US government bailing him out or funding him early on.
The Twitter purchase has investors backing it, it's not solely Elon's money, and those investors are liable to want to see returns. Odds are very high that if Twitter doesn't start generating some serious revenue quickly, those investors will try to force him out of the company. Allowing every retard on twitter to spam "NIGGER" everywhere freely or bringing Trump back would probably cause half the advertisers to bail for the sake of their brand safety.
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