Intent to drop in, make major changes, and pretend like they won't break anything is ill intent
We criticize engineers who drop into a code base and try to make changes without understanding. You can be forgiven for doing it a few times, but after that you're doing it intentionally. And if they hired engineers that didn't know this, that's incompetence at both levels.
Not only is this different code bases and IT products, it's across organizations and done very rapidly.
I am also not convinced that they don't simply have malicious intent most of the time.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice
Elon has been operating in bad faith since the Twitter Files (so, the very start). Announce X, publish receipts that show ~X, but nobody reads receipts so checkmate.
The "140 year old people in social security DB" post is just the latest example of bad-faith. Either there is actually >>$100B of social security fraud and that's the story or he wants to pretend like that's the case when he knows full well that presence in the DB does not indicate eligibility or payouts.