I'm sure he regrets a lot of it, and wishes he could go back and change some of it. However, a big part of that was poor timing with the economic cycle – if Putin hadn't invaded Ukraine, the markets might be in much better shape right now, and the deal would have turned out a lot less bad. He took a stupid risk, and it blew up on him – but it might not have, and people would have paid far less attention if it hadn't. Anyway, while US$20 billion is a huge loss in absolute terms, it is only around 10% of his net worth, even less at the time it was incurred. I'm sure he's not the first and won't be the last billionaire to lose 10% of their net worth on a bad deal, and many have bounced back from that kind of loss before. Maybe he's even learned his lesson, and will be more financially conservative in the future.
> Even if one believes that cutting 75-80% of the staff was necessary, it was very poorly done
I find it very hard to work out what is actually true about that. I heard people here condemning him for planning to let people go with no severance, and then suddenly he is giving people three months instead. Did he backtrack under pressure? Were the earlier claims just unsubstantiated rumours? How am I supposed to know. My gut feel, is he probably did make somewhat of a mess of the whole thing, but not quite as bad a mess as many claim.
> But I think the real long-term cost here to Elon is in brand damage. He was a media darling for quite a while
I think that is somewhat overstated. Remember the whole "pedo guy" incident? The "Texas Institute of Technology & Science"? A lot of people (both in the media and the general public) have disliked him for years, and they do have some legitimate reasons for that dislike. All Twitter has really done, is added to those reasons, and drawn attention to them, rather than creating something which wasn't there before.
How is SpaceX Starship going to go? Nobody really knows. Worse case scenario, is it flounders and turns into an expensive boondoggle. Best case scenario, it successfully pulls off Artemis III and dearMoon, people forget about the delays and Musk's endlessly over-optimistic timelines. If the best case scenario happens, what are people going to think of him when Twitter is yesterday's news, and Musk-founded SpaceX played a key role in returning Americans to the surface of the Moon? Especially if it happens under a Republican administration, a GOP White House will probably be rushing to give Musk a "Presidential Medal of Freedom" if Artemis III succeeds, and those who can't stand him will probably just have to bite their tongue.