Tl,dr: Musk is irratic and has no plan, per a journalist who has covered him for five years.
That’s not accurate. At least not entirely. I work with a few ex-Tesla managers who tell me the opposite. He would put his hands on any random detail at any time and override people.
Yeah, my understanding is at SpaceX they’ve done a good job of isolating him, at Tesla a not great job, and obviously at Twitter nobody’s even tried.
I think both claims can be accurate. What I’ve gathered is that Tesla and especially SpaceX have people dedicated to preventing or fixing whatever odd ideas he comes up with. So, your friends could be 100% right, but maybe aren’t as aware of other people following behind to try and clean up the mess? Or maybe sometimes the Musk Disaster Team doesn’t get deployed in time, but they could still exist in general.