Elon just went through several bad ideas to come back to the original checkmark system from 2015. The left think they just played him.
A radio station was replacing their popular DJs but knew there would be backlash. So, the new DJs pretended to be hosts for new trial DJs that were awful. Soon people were demanding the new DJs stay in charge.
I get the feeling that just happened. Did Elon do that, or was it happenstance?
Hard to say for sure though it's quite the common practice to deceive your customers into demanding what you want to give them.
The hard part is knowing what the intentions of the business/management/leader (in this case Elon) were going in.
There is a.... saying? wisdom? ... that customers don't really know what they specifically want, they will routinely ask for things that would make their experience with a product worse. However a customer will usually feel something is wrong.
This is where these kinds of plays come in, you direct that wrong feeling into the answer you want to get because the customer doesn't actually know how to fix the problem you can direct their feeling to do a 360 essentially buying yourself time. Will they complain again ? sure but it might take years.
Sometimes this happens as a cycle (rising minimum wage for example), sometimes an outright lie (new management), the often used fake sales (50% off but still the same price), or the one you just said where make things worse so people want their normal back.
All these are ways to manipulate your customer