Agree with Geoffrey that it is very hard to understand this post without examples of what is meant by Elon's "calibration". What do you mean in your very last sentence: "what, if any, are the reasons specific to Musk as a personality causing him to be so inconsistent in the ways effective altruists should care about most"? Please give some examples -- are you implying that buying Twitter in the hopes of making conversation freer and more rational is not a good EA cause area? Or implying that maybe it is a good EA cause area, but Musk is a terrible person to run said project? Or implying that Musk's other projects, like SpaceX and Tesla, are a waste of effort from an EA perspective? (I would remind you that Elon's goal has not just been to work on the most important possible cause areas with the money he has, but to found profitable companies that make progress on important-ish causes, such that he can get more money to roll into more important causes in the future. Evidently one can make more lots of money in electric car manufacturing that you can't make in bednet distribution or lobbying for better pandemic preparedness policy.) Maybe you agree with my parenthetical, but you think that Twitter will not be a moneymaking proposition for Elon, or you think that he should give up on trying to get richer and richer and switch now to working on the most important EA causes.
About twitter, I would note that Elon has been in charge for just a few days -- I don't think it's clear yet whether Elon had an "uncalibrated" sense of his capabilities and will ruin Twitter through incompetence, or if he will succeed at improving it. Maybe after a few months or a few years, the answer of whether Musk's ownership has been good or bad for Twitter will be more clear.
More generally, I would think that many attempts to launch billion-dollar companies are subject to "high variance" -- that is just an unfortunate fact of life when you are trying to do ambitious things. Many of Elon's companies have been close to bankruptcy at one point or another, but so far they have made it through. Conversely, nobody doubts that Sam Bankman-Fried is a very smart guy, but FTX (although it may have been very close to succeeding and becoming even bigger than it was) is currently being forced to sell itself to Binance for pennies on the dollar.
Personally, I take pride in the EA community's enthusiasm for "hits-based giving", and its willingness to consider low-probability, high-consequence events seriously. Unfortunately, taking action in this complex world requires making decisions under high uncertainty (including uncertainty about one's own capabilities and strengths/weaknesses). For instance, I aspire to someday found an EA-aligned charitable organization, even though my only previous job experience has been as an aerospace engineer. It's possible that I am deluded about my personal charity-running capacities, and it's possible that I'm furthermore deluded such that I'll never be able to recognize the ways in which I'm deluded about my charity-running capacities. But I think in this situation, it is often reasonable to go ahead and found the charity anyways -- otherwise fear and uncertainty will preclude any ambitious action! As Nathan Young says about SBF and the implosion of FTX -- "It is unclear if ex-ante this was a bad call from them. There is lots we don't know."
I'm having a bit of trouble reading between the lines here.
Is this post complaining about Elon Musk taking over Twitter, as if that's a bad thing? Or about him being outspoken and controversial in general?
There is a highly coordinated smear campaign against Elon Musk happening now across many news outlets, from people who are politically opposed to free speech. But I do not think that EAs should take the smear campaign very seriously.
I acknowledged in some other comments that I wrote this post sloppily, so I'm sorry for the ambiguity. Musk's recent purchase of Twitter and its ongoing consequences is part of why I've made this post. It's not about it being bad that he bought Twitter. The series of mistakes that has
It's not about him being outspoken and controversial. The problem is Musk's not being sufficiently risk-averse and potentially having blindspots that could have a significant negative impact on his EA-related/longtermist efforts.