I think people need a refresher course of the last 5 years or so. Because here's the deal.
About 2017 to 2020, maybe 2021, the internet was a huge fucking fan of Elon. Including me. I LOVED Elon. Seemed like such a down to earth guy who genuinely wanted to help the human race and was super ambitious. Even if he was flawed. From what I remember, the general consensus was you either liked him, or you felt indifferent and just didn't really care.
NOW that headspace has changed. Either you fucking hate him, or you do like him and get destroyed. Now, it took me about a year before I started to really dislike him the way the internet does. Because I felt like at the time the internet was doing what it always does. Blows shit outta proportion. That was, until I started seeing things change. Because starting about 2-3 years ago, there has been a massive ego fluctuation in Elon. His Twitter is not the same as it was back in 2019 for example. He was actually fairly level headed and would post the occasional meme. But it was always something amazing to do with Space X or Tesla. Okay, no harm there. NOW it's full of nonsensical retarded tweets, dumbass memes left and right, tweets pretty much shitting on his own users...It's a toxic fucking cesspool there. I mean this guy is at a point where he thinks rebranding a social media site that has been widely known to the public with one name, and one name only for YEARS, is a good idea. Let alone to rebrand it to a single fucking letter. Because why not? Kill your user base apparently.
What the hell happened to him? I understand why people dislike him now. As do I. But dude. How can someone fall from greatness like that? Being seen as the next Steve Jobs, flaws and all. To just a shadowy figure of himself? What made him go fucking insane and gain that huge ego?
To the people that would comment, "Well he's always been like that he just shows it now", I don't believe it. When you have such massive egotistical and narcissistic traits, you could give two shits about showing it. He would've done so his whole career if he was like this. I'm not saying he NEVER had an ego, but it wasn't anywhere fucking near the levels of where it is now.
"We were on the verge of greatness, we were THIS close!"
Tldr: All in all, Elon hasn't really changed how he operates, it's just that since aligning openly with the right he has been more open about a lot of shit and also has been boosting a lot of shit he probably doesn't really believe. This in turn has extinguished a lot of the support he had in the internet which leads to people actually scrutinizing his character and a lot more than what he says has come to light or is being analyzed in a different light to what it was back then, painting Elon as the evil and stupid billionare he actually is.
The actual comment:
I know you said to not say he has always been like that, but the honest truth is he has been like that, it's just that the media was used to taking everything he said at face value and he was a bit more restrained (although not necessarily on interviews themselves).
The amount of controversy about him busting unions, having poor working conditions, stealing credit from his engineers, this was always public knowledge even when he was generally beloved by the common redditors. This is not meant to be a dig or anything, but at least on the leftists circles I tend to participate in this was always mentioned whenever he was in talks, it's just that most people don't care when billionares are exploitative pieces of shit, yhey just care about the image they sell.
He was also always surrounded by stupid scandals pre 2021, be it the submarine pedo (where for some reason I saw people on refdit defending him), him suddenly denying his family had shares on emerald mines, him and all his sex and abuse scandals, it all made news but got forgotten as soon as he pulled an "epic move" like doge coin...
What I said before is regarding his actions and actual contributions to the companies he controls, which is related to why he is do shit at handling twitter as a company, now about his public persona, the tweets he currently posts and why he is hated en mass.
Most his memes have always been reposts, buy the problem is that he now aligns with the far right in the united states, there are many reasons of why this happened and this has been absolutely clear when he daid that shit about Dems being shit now do he moved towards republicans (which is a lie but it's the poiny where the public noticed he is a republican despite him being on the forefront of electric cars), due to his alignment and changes to the poilitical spehere on the US being on the right now means believing a lot of racial conspiracy lies, that environmental change is a lie (which ironically hurts his own business), that January 6 was justified, etc. Elon right now boosts about any and all right wing accounts he ca find by replying "how curious" to the most insane racist meme about the DESPITE BEING 13% meme
It takes a lot of effort to convince a few smart people that you're smart.
A fraction of that effort can convince millions of morons.
He just found a new target audience with a better ROI.