Republicans have traditionally been the party of "regulation doesn't work, elect me and I can prove it to you".
Maybe Musk is just taking the logical counter-part to this "regulation doesn't work, put me in charge of a heavily regulated company and I can prove it to you".
Olive oil?
You wouldn't live long, but compared to the other options you're listing...
This is just completely untrue. Musk founded SpaceX from nothing, there was no prior entity he acquired or invested in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_SpaceX
There are lots of legitimate reasons to dislike Musk, there's really no need to make up lies about him to justify having an extremely low opinion of him.
The broad strokes are here: https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379
In addition to the more important issues that fedi-tips discusses I find their stance on anti-vax and US-election conspiracy theories... unappealing, which you can see being discussed here: https://lemmy.ml/post/143057
And that they haven't been shy about exerting their power for political purposes. The hardcoded slur-filter was explicitly about discouraging "right wingers" (I put that in quotes because I suspect their definition of right wing and mine differ), and they at least use to be open about their intentions to moderate the instances that they run as explicitly "left wing" (though I don't see a reference to that on the current site).
I can't speak to Lemmy's implementation (I refuse to go near lemmy on account of the maintainers "politics"), but there's nothing fundamental about threading that should make posting slower.
Loading threads here is... different... work than loading your feed in mastodon, it's possibly slower, but posting is from a theoretical standpoint the same. Probably you're just seeing the effect of your lemmy instance not running on sufficient hardware (very understandable given the explosion in user space size).
What is a reddit thread if not a root tweet with a bunch of replies (and replies to the replies) formatted in a way that you see the organization of the replies?
It will change things too, not for reddit, but for competitors (like kbin).
A tiny site can only grow so fast, at some point things start breaking (both technically and as a community) and users stop joining, but as sites grow bigger they also gain the ability to grow faster.
The protest means that every possible alternative to reddit has been growing as fast as it can reasonably support. That's probably not fast enough to hurt reddit this time, but next time it might be.