It's basically a matter of a branded domain name and Mastodon will take over.
Governments and entities like the New York MTA are going to want something they control, rather than something that falls to the whims of some billionaire.
The tech for Mastodon is there. You just needs orgs that care less about reach and who trust people to come to them (like the New York MTA).
That's assuming that his goal is to run a profitable social media company that people respect, enjoy, and that makes profit. However, he's loaded af and can easily pay for the best consultants in the world. Considering that, I think it's possible that he might be reaching his goals, they're just not what we assume they are.
I've seen varying levels of this general idea that Musk somehow is still playing some 4d chess and the downfall of twitter is the plan, but it's really not. Twitter was already a niche generally. I only know like 2 people IRL who were on twitter, compared to basically everyone on Facebook, for example, and you can check the stats, twitter commanded way more mindspace than it actually had.
And even if the master plan was to kill twitter - so what? This won't stop anything. There is an argument to be made that all of the journalists and what not coalesced over there, but that's just not going to stop happening. It's like if someone wanted to kill instant messaging. "HA HA ICQ, this time I've got you!" Except, it's not the platform that's important, and it's easily replaced.
Even if Elon's plan is "let's federate" it's still an inane way to do it, but this seems like a more likely outcome.
Hanlon again for the win, simplest answer is he's not nearly as smart as anyone pretends.
Yeah the thing that people are upset about reddit for with rate limited apps is something twitter did years ago. Then theres the everything else involved on twitter and its not even close.