I can’t imagine anyone that has decent prospects would agree to go back to Tesla after getting canned with those kinds of wild swings in decision making.
I think he was genuinely better back then too.
Not great - in a ton of ways - but way better.
Something snapped 4 or so years ago and all his worst parts have been getting progressively worse.
I think part of it was he had a really tough time dealing with California covid regulations for his business. It wasn’t something he could buy his way out of or pad someone’s pocket to make go away and they were very serious about it. In the same vein, that’s around the time his daughter came out as trans and you can see how that ended with her changing her name and completely disassociating herself from him. Combine that all with a slow (arguable) but consistent decline in the public’s admiration and opinion of him (which he craves desperately) and he began to crack.
Started running into things he couldn’t control or pay to go away and couldn’t cope I guess… I dunno
I can tell you, knowing people who worked with the guy since the original launch of the Model S, he’s always been like this. He’s always been a loud mouthed idiot, and he’s always been insanely unpredictable. The only thing that changed has been his PR team and personal handlers, and how much the news media is willing to focus on how much of a POS the dude is.
I mean if you read some of what his first wife wrote, he was pretty much this bad. Though at the time she was saying it the world didn’t want to hear it. He also did the whole retcon Tesla to be founded by him over 15 years ago, in some pretty petty behavior. When x.com failed relative to PayPal, he somehow managed to get them to merge and make him the head of PayPal, and then they kicked him down when we almost tanked PayPal.
It basically seems that a critical mass of people were covering for him and propping up the brand of his name and image, likely for the sake of their investments. Which should be a fairly familiar story, because 80s Trump had the same things going on, very bad business results glossed over by investors needing to keep the Trump brand strong for the sake of their own money. Both trump and musk successfully tied up some big business fate with their names specifically, forcing investors to play into the conceit.
He let the crazy veil slip a bit during the Thai cave rescue drama, but Covid seems to have really pushed him over the edge.
