Baiting the establishment press like this and making the plebs vote on their fate is actually a pretty good distraction move and gives him an opportunity to climb down in a somewhat face-saving fashion (I'm doubtful he's crazy enough to go through with suing Jack Sweeney, but we'll see).
Of course this doesn't change the fact that Musk is an unprincipled and pampered hypocrite and could have handled this much better. A no-live-tracking policy would have offered very little real attack surface if it had been rolled out in a remotely competent fashion.