Was he lying back then and is truthful now, or did the pandemic just break him?
he just realized which crowd responds better to sucking up
He was pandering them, and hes pandering now, its just to different people
Bingo. Elon has a pathological need to be fawned over and will say whatever he needs to to make that happen.
Initially, he found that warm mouth in the left wing for championing products to address climate change, but he was still being held accountable for his failures and obnoxiousness.
When Trump showed him that reactionaries will love you just being a narcissistic asshole and they could be bought for a pittance, he jumped ship. If a bigger, more easily swayed group of people became available to him, he’d rewrite his personality to pander to them instead.
He got rid of his PR team at some point, his trans daughter disowned him, and Grimes left him and started going out with Chelsea Manning. I think he got broken. Add wanting to be cool on top of that and you’ve got a recipe for a billionaire “pick me”
Wasn’t there also the thing where he offered a horse to a masseuse if they’d give him a happy ending? A couple days before the story broke he made some statements supporting Republicans then said “watch the left come up with a story to take me down now that I’m a Republican,” or something like that. All his political shit has been downhill and ever more unhinged since.
He was always saying side-eye worthy shit, but in a generic rich guy way. His political stuff, before the horse thing, was always progressive-ish. Whether that was what he ready thought, or as the biggest shareholder of an electric car company he knew which side his bread was buttered on, I’m sure I don’t know. But it seems like trying to preempt the horse story was the turning point for his public persona.
Genuinely, this was back when he still had PR people managing his reputation.
Iirc, he got rid of them sometime around the submarine incident.
This was also around the time when the public perception about Musk was different. Reddit thought of him as a “real-life Tony Stark”, who put a car in space and is a little eccentric. That perception about him peaked on August 2018 when he appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Around 2020 he started to go deeper into QAnon-esque rabbit-hole, turning into the despised far-right wacko he is today. Of course he has been always an opportunistic hack.
He genuinely did not ever appear (publicly) to be a shit bag narcissist, though. I say this as someone who kept an eye on musk from around 2000, and invested early (as well as exiting early due to his narcissism). In every interview he just came across as neurodivergent, but never as though he didn’t care about the planet, the environment, or the climate crisis. He was one of the only wealthy people promoting electric cars 20 years ago, well before it was considered profitable. He was also the only wealthy person advocating for risk mitigation as a species (a mars colony).
Regardless of recent events, I’m not dumb enough to believe he was always a sociopath who simply managed to act like an empathetic human, flawlessly, for well over a decade. If he were always the narcissist he is today, and has been the last 5-10 years, the cracks would have been apparent long ago. Musk is not, and has never been, a great actor. In fact he’s always been extremely awkward; what you see, is what you get. That was legitimately refreshing before the narcissism! Instead I came to the conclusion — like many people before me — that absolute power corrupts, absolutely. Narcissists are not born; they are created. It’s no different to Bezos. In this interview from 27 years ago he’s just a regular nerd; not the corporate “let them piss in jars” sociopath he is today. The evidence is clear. The evidence is abundant, going back long before antiquity. Extreme wealth and power create narcissism; an anti-social, destructive mental illness. For the sake of all life on Earth, Billionaires should not exist.
