Didn't he kind of did that after becoming CEO of Tesla? How else did he bring the roaster to positive gross margins after Eberhard lied about everything?
...no?
Elon became involved back when Tesla had like 3 employees and
zero product He became chairman and largest shareholder like 8 months after the founding of the company. JB joined as CTO a couple months after that.
Eberhard ceased being CEO in August 2007- months before they ever built a single production roadster. Elon didn't become CEO until the following year after Eberhard was already gone.
So to sum up why he did not "kind of do that" with Tesla--- Elon didn't join an already established company that had been in production for years with lots of employees. he didn't join a company where he wasn't FROM THE START deeply involved in development of the product, and he didn't barge in as CEO and enact mass firings of people with deep institutional knowledge he lacked,
No, he just walked into the entire launch industry of the entire freaking planet and tell everyone you're all dumb F's and only I can fix this, which he ends up doing.
Well no he didn't do that either.
There was for all practical purposes no significant civilian/private launch industry when SpaceX was founded, just a few government contractors that occasionally put up a commercial satellite with the same rockets they built for the government.
He didn't "fix" an industry full of bad players- he largely
invented a new industry--- and also notable he didn't do it by buying of the the bad players and trying to fix it.
SpaceX was the first privately funded fully liquid-fueled rocket to reach orbit....
Also the first privately developed spacecraft to put a commercial satellite in orbit...
Also the first private company to successfully launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft.
SpaceX was also the first for:
Landing of an orbital class rockets first stage (on land or sea)
First reuse and landing of an orbital first stage
First private company to send a human-rated craft to space or send humans to orbit or the ISS
Plus a crazy long list of other firsts.
Meanwhile Twitter has been around for over 15 years and it's not even in the top 10 in number of users among social media sites- an industry that's been around even longer.