My completely unfounded and speculative pet theory is that when casual punters tried to read Reddit using their favourite 3rd Party app, and couldn’t, they went to use Twitter instead.
Since Twitter has been haemorrhaging regular users all year, and trying to cut costs, their diminished infrastructure couldn’t handle it, causing Elon to panic and release his policy change.
From what I understand (though I could be wrong), Twitter's Google Cloud Platform contract expired on June 30th. Twitter was behind schedule on changing over to another platform. So the rate limit was a poor attempt to try to keep Twitter "working".
Clearly, it wasn't thought through very well. It's a holiday weekend in the US. Many people won't be back on a normal work schedule until Wednesday (US Independence Day is on Tuesday). And people have already found ways to bypass the rate limit. And Elon had to keep raising the rate limit throughout the day. It went from 6,000 verified/ 600 unverified/ 300 new unverified to 8,000/ 800/ 400 to (last I checked) 10,000/ 1,000/ 500.
no he simply just hasn't been paying bills, now google cloud is kicking twitter off it's infrastructure because musk won't pay, they even got kicked out of a bunch of their offices due to unpaid rent