He was always bullshit, it just took a while to really come to light. Tesla was pioneering electric cars to a broader consumer base, and he was the founder right? But then it turned out he literally paid for the title of founder.

We didn't know the guy back then. Now we do. Everything he did was dubious in retrospect and mostly took off when he left, and everything he does now is just batshit crazy, but now we know. That's all. The only thing that differs from other people is that he have the funding to smoothen the worst of failures.

Whatever it is, it sucks because Space-X /starlink is doing really good things. Tesla (minus the full self driving hype) are great and super safe cars.

I wish Musk could be bought out from those two companies.

Kompromat

The SNL skit of him mentioning DOGE is when it all ended for him.

Me always was like this, just now more people has realized how much of an actual idiot he is. People had been speaking about how evil he is for many years.

I see a connection between elon's increasingly 'wacky' persona with the start of the cozy financial relationship he has with saudi arabia. imo, he's serving as a captured asset for oil giants to further their influence and interests in the west, in a similar vein to all the recent acquisitions of popular US/UK sports teams by the middle east.

The 'eccentric' behavior, to me, is 100% intentional. A layer of security is built when your rivals, regulators, and the general public are unable to predict your next move. A 'white noise' is created: for every midnight decision to change your company logo to dogecoin, intentional and sinister actions slip thru, such as the banning of twitter in turkey during their recent elections.

This strategy of wrapping yourself in layers of ambiguity was explored by Adam Curtis in his doc Hypernormalization, describing how this has been the central tactic Putin has used in Russia for decades.

Besides what other users mentioned, we should also consider that the internet has a tendency to polarise discourses.

Without that polarisation, I believe that Elon Musk would go from "some rich and annoying weirdo, with a bunch of stupid ideas and a few decent ones" to "some rich and annoying weirdo, with a bunch of stupid ideas". The overall opinion about him would decay, but by no means as much as we've seen - because it wouldn't start so good to begin with.

He just like Russell brand found themselves with too much time during lockdown and decided to turn to the darkside and embrace the crazy.

I read an article on the WSJ just yesterday that said he (and many others in the Silicon Valley) are using psychedelic drugs while working in order to find new business ideas. they are into microdosing (which I’m not against), but they also throw big drug parties according to the WSJ and that might have messed with his mind. That, COVID and the recent breakup upon a narcissistic personality might be enough to explain his total breakdown.

What happened to him? You outlined it.

He became a very popular figure on the internet when the whole world was getting glued to their screens.

He's not riding that wave, it launched him to the stratosphere. Launched him so high he didn't even realize when he started falling.

He's now reacting to the cheers of people who want him to lean into his mental illnesses.

Didn’t he change the name to get out of a pricey real estate agreement?

Early onset of dementia.