Hi. I'm an expert in modernizing legacy government software systems. This is profoundly stupid and will definitely fail

[Emrys]

43. Musk's whole "career" features episodes of radical recoding of systems, with unpredictable results

At his co-venture that started building his fortune, Zip2, coders brought on board faced sorting out the mess of the self-taught Musk's coding efforts:

“They took one look at Zip2’s code and began rewriting the vast majority of the software. Musk bristled at some of their changes, but the computer scientists needed just a fraction of the lines of code that Musk used to get their jobs done. They had a knack for dividing software projects into chunks that could be altered and refined whereas Musk fell into the classic self-taught coder trap of writing what developers call hairballs—big, monolithic hunks of code that could go berserk for mysterious reasons.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9356850-they-took-one-look-at-zip2-s-code-and-began-rewriting

Musk's counter to these efforts has been quoted by some fans as evidence of his "drive":

Elon Musk used to rewrite engineers' code who were working for him at Zip2 after they went home.

https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/elon-musk-used-to-rewrite-code-of-engineers-working-at-zip2-after-they-went-home-never-wanted-to-be-a-ceo-2438663-2023-09-21

It seems his tyro-level knowledge and inability to accept that he needed to improve it meant he didn't understand his engineers' coding so he changed it to comply with methods he thought he understood.

A little later, when a series of mergers saw Musk's X.com being integrated with what became PayPal, Max Levchin, who had written pretty much the entirety of PayPal's code using Unix, came into conflict with Musk, the new CEO, who wanted to migrate everything to Windows because he was more familiar with that platform's programming tools (or at least claimed to be). This was just one of the conflicts that led to Musk's ousting as CEO.

At Twitter, he continued his obsession with meddling and misplacing the blame for resulting problems:

Twitter needs a ‘complete rewrite’ after it broke again, Elon Musk says
Site’s code means that it is ‘brittle’, CEO says – but reports claim lack of staff may have made the problem worse
...
The outage on Monday was caused by a “bad configuration change” that “basically broke the Twitter API”, a staff member said, according to Platformer. Twitter is currently attempting to change how that API works, so that it will no longer allow users free access to tweets, for instance.

“We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences,” the company had explained in an update on its Twitter support account.

The outage quickly hit internal Twitter systems and other important services, as well as showing up as broken images and links for users.

Staff had previously been employed to evaluate the risks of such configuration changes. But they were among the employees that have been fired to leave Twitter with less than 25 per cent of the staff it had before Mr Musk took over.

But Mr Musk has continued to argue that the code running the site itself is at fault, and that it will need to be completely rewritten.

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/twitter-down-elon-musk-explained-rewrite-b2296116.html

Around that time, Musk took to telling all and sundry that Twitter's "stack" was terminally faulty and the whole site would have to be recoded from scratch. A Twitter programmer challenged him on an open forum to describe Twitter's stack and what precisely was wrong with it, and he shamelessly waffled, revealing he was just spouting jargon he didn't understand.

SpaceX uses Python extensively for its operations. Google says that Python is Musk's "favourite" computer language. Hang on there:

The Australian co-creator of Dogecoin has described Elon Musk as a “grifter” who sells a vision that he pretends to understand while not even knowing how to run basic code.

Jackson Palmer is an Australian-born software developer who created Dogecoin, a meme-based cryptocurrency that soon became one of the world’s most valuable digital currencies. He stopped working on the cryptocurrency in 2015 and has since denounced the technology.

In a rare, wide-ranging interview with Crikey coinciding with the launch of his new podcasts about grifts, he spoke about Elon Musk, the cryptocurrency “winter” and the mainstreaming of rentier capitalism.

Palmer says he spoke with Musk over Twitter direct messages after he developed a script to automatically report cryptocurrency scams in a user’s replies: “Elon reached out to me to get hold of that script and it became apparent very quickly that he didn’t understand coding as well as he made out. He asked, “How do I run this Python script?”

https://www.crikey.com.au/2022/05/30/dogecoin-jackson-palmer-elon-musk-cryptocurrency-bubble/

It looks like Musk is more concerned with trying to set up a new system he and his gang of tearaway code jockeys can understand (or Musk has more chance of bluffing successfully about) than getting them trained in COBOL (or, heaven forbid, hiring or rehiring some people who know what they're doing with it) so they can work with the existing system.