Six years ago

According to his trans daughter, he was treating her like shit long before this, so he's always been an asshole.
- Yeah it looks like anyone close to him (including his business partners) says he was an asshole.
  It looks like he had a great PR firm until then, which he stopped using, because he thought he can do better on his own.
  
  Started to believe the bullshit himself basically... a spectacular fall from public grace.
- He's definitely always been an asshole but he only went crazy a few years ago.
  
  He only went crazy publicly a few years ago.
  
  He used to care enough about money to not say these things publicly. Now he's got so much money that it really doesn't matter if it costs him a billion dollars to tweet something stupid.
  Either that or all the ketamine over the long term fucked up his brain somehow.
- His daughter was 14 at the time of this tweet. I don't know when she came out to Musk, but it's possible this tweet was before he started treating her like shit.

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.
  
  One does have to wonder how the horse came up. I can only come up with raunchy pythonesque logic based bartering.
- I originally thought that, but when I read the interview with his daughter- nope. He's always been a queerphobe bigot. Long before she transitioned, when Elon thought she was a gay boy, he constantly berated her for not being masculine enough and just for being queer in general.
  
  I like to imagine he was "hiding his power level" before.
- Wait what’s that about Chelsea Manning‽
  
  https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/07/the-grimes-and-chelsea-manning-chapter-has-reportedly-closed

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.
  
  Thanks for posting the Besos interview!
  Super interesting that they were already hoovering up user data as fast as they could in '97 - half a gigabyte per day.
- pretty sure still thinks about him that way

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.
- Why can't he pander to his children then?
  
  he doesn't see them as people, plus he can't make money off of them so they're of no value

Genuinely, this was back when he still had PR people managing his reputation.
Iirc, he got rid of them sometime around the submarine incident.

he just realized which crowd responds better to sucking up

His daughter came out and he lost his shit over it and blames Biden.

if you think he's the only rich dude to say whatever he needs to get what he wants, i've got a bridge to sell ya
- what am i supposed to do with a bridge
  edit: oh i think i get it now. very clever
  
  It's a reference to someone "selling" the Brooklyn bridge to someone else for scrap long ago. I think so anyway.
  
  It's a saying that he'll sell you a bridge that he doesn't own because you're gullible.

Six years ago, conservatives would vandalize Teslas in parking lots. Then, when Elon became an open bigot, conservatives started buying Teslas and worshipping Elon. I wonder why that is.
Guys, I'm starting to think conservatives might be bigots.
- That’s called voting with your wallet, which is different from cancel culture, because woke.
- Remember when Twitter (pre-Musk) said it couldn't ban Nazis because it would hit Republican politicians?

When a billionaire cishet guy talks about LGBT rights in order to sell cars, how can anyone think that's not pinkwashing?

if Trump loses the election, expect musk to suddenly attempt to reconcile with his trans daughter and embrace indigenous cultures or whatever the hell he thinks liberals like
- Nah he'll declare that the United States has become a fascist dictatorship and probably spout some lies about election rigging.

He's always been a troll. He says and does whatever he thinks it takes for people to pay attention to him. I doubt it goes any deeper than that.

I think he desperately wants to be liked. He used to say liberal things, because that’s more popular. Now he’s got enough money that a bunch of people will like him no matter what (or pretend to), so he can say what he really thinks while being insulated from the repercussions.

This was a few weeks before the mask fell off with the pedo guy tweet.

Don't let this fool you, not from him and not from anyone representing a corporation. Corporations time and time again will say and do whatever it takes to profit, including pretending to care about human rights.

100/100 and then tweets like this lol.
Whatever's trendy at the time, I guess, fuck whatever that is.

He changes his opinions based on what benefits him, but he genuinely believes them at the time. He's an idiot.

In all honesty he probably doesn't believe any of what he publicly says. Trump probably offered him less government scrutiny for his inherently dangerous projects (tesla self driving, SpaceX experimental rockets etc) as well as the billionaire tax breaks and he's just trying to get him elected for his own personal profit. I've never seen a billionaire's life be affected by a government decision, they all do as they please anyway (unless they're in China or Russia)
- Since at the time, he still had his rather spectacular or team… it’s probably not even him writing that.

I'm guessing he realized within those six years that the political party which lets him run his companies as though USA is a third world country have a very different set of values which he has to follow to influence the elections.

He was lying back then, just like he is lying now.