As a civic technologist currently contracting, I feel like more Americans should know that procurement rules all but prevent federal offices from doing their own software development and that most of it is, as you wrote, subsubsubcontracted.
It took me a while to grok monads, and the IO monad, and longer still to figure out how to compose them in safe ways, and manipulate execution order, etc. But: now I can write typesafe applications, and I produce fewer bugs when I work in non-FP languages (I get paid to write Java.) Lisp is a starting point. Haskell is where it's at. I recommend learning the style, even if you never produce production code in it.
That is, indeed, an observed phenomenon. I work in human behavior in Washington, D.C., in a position where I am paid to think about the causes of harassment, discrimination, and violence, and how we, if we believe it is valuable or necessary to reduce these behaviors, how they come into existence, arrange human affairs such that their costs are minimized. I am not some random left-wing hack for whom fascism is anything to the right of Stalin. Musk is definitely on the fascist spectrum.
The 10 kids while repping on his $44 billion dollar Titanic transphobes, homophobes, etc. I'm not talking about fascism as in "kill all of the people of a certain ethnic group," but there are, if you're in the study of ideology, politics, moral epistemology, etc., smaller, lower-case fascisms before people start calling you "Fuhrer." There is something in Elon's behavior and signaled preferences that very much comes across as a bio-Darwinistic, egoistic, self-maximizing project, e.g. a fascism.
Define "fix." Twitter is a tool used by extremists to reach massive audiences. Some of those extremists have socially destructive and violent objectives. Responding to harassment and hate speech involves understanding the psychology of harassers and racists so that incentives can be designed not to reward those behaviors. IMO, "fixing" Twitter isn't just about fail whales and 500 errors.
This is the George Hotz MO: I trust him to create a lot less than I trust him to optimize, and I trust him with optimization only in a very narrow technical sense. "Optimizing" Twitter by reducing headcount to 50, regardless of the social or revenue consequences, is actually stupid. Optimizing a whole mess of software that exists between your tensor and the hardware is a decent idea.
The math isn't super difficult. Some books will try to throw a mess of differential equations at you, but some simple calculus is all you need for backpropagation.