I think that may have been shortly after he and Grimes got together so likely she introduced him to more drugs than whatever he was already taking.

Yeah, his whole idea of sending a submarine to rescue the kids, then going completely berserk with pedophile accusations was the wake up call for me. Before that, almost the entire coverage of him over Ars Technica was positive

Yeah, that was the incident that really made me look back on his previous action with fresh eyes and reconsider my opinion of him.

Like you said, it went downhill fast after that

I think he's more like Notch and Rowling, they had a fuck ton of money, the ability to never be told no, some pre existing regressive ideas, and got addicted to the internet as it became a hellscape. These people were each just as isolated as the friendless 4channer in their mom's basement, just in a different way, and they were just as in need of therapy.

What we know from Vivian Wilson and her mom is that both paint a believable picture of Musk pre extreme wealth. A tenacious man who always wanted more and was wracked by insecurity. He insisted on sex selective ivf to ensure he only had sons and he punished his daughter when she failed to be sufficiently masculine. He relentlessly pursued and wooed his first wife, but dumped her basically immediately upon striking it rich. When combined with his childhood abuse, current behavior, and emotional neediness in everything he does, I'm comfortable using a framework of NPD to understand him (yeah it's an armchair diagnosis so take it as a proposed model, not a diagnosis). Within that framework the worst thing for his mental health was to become rich, famous, and terminally online. His inability to take criticism and his response to lash out at it publicly and permanently is one of his big reasons for his rightward shift as it came while he was being criticized by the left for his treatment of workers.

For me, it was his personal life. He was famous so I looked him up. He didn’t treat his relationships well. It honestly looked like he used them until he could "upgrade."

same moment for me. I thought he was super cool for starting an all electric car company, having the potential to start another space race and advance science, bringing together some engineers to quickly build a rescue submersible, but the pedophile comment totally broke the enchantment

Watching NazYe spiral that quickly was kinda amusing in one of those 'cant look away from the accident' moments.

Looks like that was in 2018. Hadn't heard of that. The first hint for me was in 2019 when planning to build a Tesla plant in Germany's black forest. Cant act like you are helping the environment with electric cars when you destroy it to create said cars...

For me it was shoving a bunch of Teslas in a hole in Las Vegas and calling it a "hyperloop" that was when I fully realized he was entirely full of shit

Yeah, pretty sure that was after he fired his media team and we started seeing what he was really like.

I think he had a great PR team and then one day just went off script forever.

He's a child of apartheid and, according to his own daughter, was always an awful person in private.

There's lots of precedent for white supremacists keeping a low(-ish) profile when it suits them. Just look at famous card-holding Nazi and prolific mass-murderer Werner Von Braun and his public perception in the US. If he could cultivate the image of America's Dearest Scientist, literally anyone could.