Political Weirdos

While he was always an asshole, everyone has some ratio of bad/good. In the early/mid 2010s he was able to keep enough of a lid on things that he had a positive reputation with among both the public and investors.

Back then he still had his handler/business mommy Mary Beth Brown. She had basic control over his scheduling and publicity outreach since he started Tesla. In 2014 he canned her after she asked for a raise, he's been handling his own pr and schedule ever since.

The problem with assuming that this is a recent change in personality is that it requires ignoring all his prior reported behaviour. It ignores how much media marketing actually changes our perceptions of powerful people.

No Elon did not become an asinine child overnight, he's been that way the whole time. He just believes he's now rich enough that he doesn't have to pretend to be a different person. No JFK Jr did not become an insane person because he watched too much fox news, he's literally been eating roadkill since he was a child.

All of these wealthy and powerful people have an entire system working for them dedicated to protecting their public image.

A lot of times it feels like it's a matter of time before he gets on stage with Kanye and starts trying to rap.

I don't know if you came up with this but god damn lol.

One of them was from freaking Star Trek, which as a sidenote inadvertently ended up aging like wine.

On the other hand, it was said by evil mirror Lorca, so maybe it works?

You're trying to blame his shift on social media and the pandemic, and you're also claiming that the same thing happened to millions of other people for the same reasons, and I just haven't seen any evidence to support that.

We can point to people acting like lunatics during the pandemic, of course, but if you want to claim that to pandemic caused them to become lunatics then you would have to look at how they behaved prior to it. And you can try to blame social media for how people see politics, but there again I don't think the facts are on your side. Most people know that things your friend posts on Facebook may or may not be true. But many people, especially middle-aged and older people, believe that there's a great deal of truth in the 24-hour news cycle that they see on television, when in reality that's been highly tailored by the major news networks to make it seem like the sky is falling.

It has been remarked for a long time that many arrogant ultra rich people end up surrounding themselves by yes men, that insulation is created by their money and power, and over time their views grow unhinged because they don't have contact with the real world or the general public. We know this happens often enough, and if I were speculating, I'd say the same thing happened here.

Do you remember the whole debacle in 2018 where he defamed the guy who actually rescued the kids by calling him a pedophile after his stupid sub idea was shot down?

The difference between now and the late 00s/early 10s, is that he actually listened to his RP people. Before he took over SpaceX and Tesla there wasn't much reason for people to pay attention to him so the narrative that he was using his wealth to improve humanity was taken at face value and pushed in the media.

The more spotlight he got and the more he interacted with other public figures, the more it was apparent that he wasn't liberal minded as he had been made out to be and the more of his history in South Africa and early days of what we'd call the modern internet started to reveal him to what he always was, a nepo baby using his money to plaster his name over other people's accomplishments. He never was a modern day Nikolai Tesla, he's a modern day Thomas Edison, pushing his own bad ideas and ensuring no one who works for him gets proper credit or compensation for the work making him money.

I think there are some people who just exist in our communities and lives that can shed some light here.

The father who’s generally progressive in public, because he never really cared about it when it doesn’t affect him. But he was cruel to his “son” for displaying failure of masculinity growing up, and later when that “son” came out as a trans woman he became a vocal transphobe.

The business owner who always tried to focus on businesses that addressed new and futuristic ideas. Always tried to keep things as cool as possible, especially in presenting the business to the public. But while he was willing to put in irresponsible amounts of work, he expected the same of his employees. When they started discussing collective bargaining, his facade of being different and socially responsible fell to the wayside as he began fighting tooth and nail against unions, and employees increasingly felt comfortable talking about his bad behavior in all manner of topics as well as the public began listening about it.

The man who in college falls for a woman, and has a family with her. But he strikes it rich and becomes famous and files for divorce leaving her with the kids and screwed by a prenup.

The individual who consistently alienates those around themselves, who refuses to build community, instead believing themselves different, better. They may be chasing fame, wealth, and power, but they may not be. Getting it is irrelevant. But regardless in their alienation they find Internet communities. Them develop a sense of communal identity without connection, friendship, camaraderie, or comfortable belonging. A crude facsimile of community that fails to provide for interpersonal needs. And while they’re in these places they begin flowing down the pipeline to radicalization.

An individual with a strained relationship with a parent understands their parents flaws and swears they’re not going to be like that. They succeed somewhat but not completely.

Each of these things we can see Elon fall into. He’s all of them in the extreme. He is human, deeply so. Each of these involved him making choices that got him here