

That’s fair, although technically you could catch SIGSEGV and release resources that way too.
Also, given that resources will be reclaimed by the OS regardless of which kind of crash we’re talking about, the effective difference is usually (but not always) negligible.
Either way, no user would consider a panic!()
to be not a crash because destructors ran. And most developers don’t either.
I can take this one: Because he doesn’t actually care about creating anything of value. If he truly believed in it, you’re right, Twitter or even Tesla’s software engineers would be on the chopping block and he’d replace them with AI as soon as he can. But he doesn’t.
He knows this is a longshot. Most likely to fail, but very profitable on the near-impossible chance that it works. But he doesn’t care even if the odds are truly impossible. Because this is an investment opportunity, so people will throw money his way, no matter what the odds.
People assume he’s an idiot, and he is. But he’s not stupid, at least not in every way. He certainly has a skill for separating others from their money, which he happily takes advantage of.