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!"
Buddy, you fell for the PR machine. Back in 2002 when Elmo was thinking about what to do with his ill gained money in order to ~~scam the us government~~ make more money he wanted to rely on a futuristic sort of image to raise capital. We came from the turn of the millennium but nothing futuristic had actually materialized. Mind you, not utopia futurism but more like rugged individualism dystopia futurism. Then in 2008 a movie came out, IronMan, starring Robert Downey Jr. And Musk thought that everyone liked that guy and if he presented himself that way—he owned a space launch company after all—then people would like him and he would be able to raise more money. Hence the hair implants (he was balding before) and Tesla self-driving (it was just electric cars before), and SpaceX to mars (originally it was just a fund sink to do something useful with all soviet era rockets), brain implants, etc. Along with it came a blitz PR campaign. The Muskrat didn't have a significant public presence before 2010, no one knew who he was other than some eccentric billionaire who owned things nerds liked. Electric cars, and rockets. So he and a few publicists for hire pushed him hard into the public eye as the real life Tony Stark. That's it.
Cut to 6 years later, no more publicists. You see, he wanted more publicity, the way he acquired it was by inserting himself in any conversation he could. But as a any narcissist, Musk thinks himself perfect and incapable of any wrong doing, any fault is someone's else and everyone are just dead weight dragging him down. So when he wanted to insert himself into the Thailand cave tragedy, Tesla's PR, who doubled as his personal PR, told him please don't. He called a guy a pedophile and fired the PR (“all the PR my companies need is me as their CEO”). He came from 6 years where everything he said was applauded by the public and anything he commanded was done. Then he ~~paid to be~~ was declared the richest man on earth. Nothing rubs the narcissist's ego like being publicly acknowledge as what they think themselves to be. But this means all self-restrain was off and without any external constrains, his true self has come to be publicly known.
Yup, this is exactly what happened.
Maybe I'm the odd one out but I can't take any "take" seriously when people can't just use names. I've seen "Elaine" and now "Elmo" and "Muskrat".
Look at WhatASave Dave over here, simping for Space Karen and trying to claim the moral high ground at the same time.
He didn't defend Musk at all. He was just commenting on the style of the conversation. But trying to come up with a new school-ground insult for someone every thread is admittedly immature and makes it really hard to follow the conversation if you're not terminally online. It's like everyone is trying to copy Donald Trump now.
Humor is dead.
I really like your narratization of the events, for me it had to do with him always being shitty but people always turning a blind eye because they fall into grand futuristic schemes instead of recognizing the union busting, sex scandal fiend may be a piece of shit.
Also a factor you didn't mention was his fall into the alt right which has gained ire from most people over the internet (aside from right wing echo chambers or his twitter clique)