When did Elon's public exposure as a TWAT and Mega-asshole begin?

This is why Elon Musk is a “scumbag piece-of-shit” according to the internet. Having all the money via political bribery, nepotism and Goldman Sachs stock market rigging does not make him a “genius”, it makes him a corrupt TWAT:

Avid_bathroom_reader
• The Thai cave thing was what did it for me and a lot of people in my social circle. Got real weird real quick.

The_Quirk
• Elon Musk surrounds himself with delusional sycophants and fires anybody who tells him he has been exposed. If Elon Musk read all of these comments about himself he would kill himself. Musk spends most of his money creating an echo chamber sphere around himself to keep his sick mind insulted in his own sociopath world. He owns MILLIONS of bots on the internet that echo his ego-hype.

ChaoticKiwiNZ
• Yup. The second he got a hero that saved those children and called him a pedophile was when his mask slipped too much for the general public to not notice. It put on full dispthat he not only has s massive ego but is also a prick of a person. Most people I know shifted their opinion on him after that. Although the instance that I knew he seemed like a prick was actually when Top Gear reviewed one of his cars badly early on. He didn't take it well at all but that one was a but of a tricky one to judge because Jeremy Clarkson is also known to be a bit of an ass at times and wasn't (and still isn't) a fan of EVs, lol.

PonterGeese
• When Elon Musk and Steve Jurvetson and their crony big tech assholes told all of the pension funds that ‘ai’ would allow all blue collar workers to be fired and we could get rid of the dumb workers forever. That will kill the rest of the American economy.

Tomly532
• The only thing that his SpaceX does is launch spy satellites that blow up and/or spy on citizens. That IS ALL that SpaceX does!

Sunny675
• Elon Musk will go down in the history books as one of the biggest ASSHOLES in the history of the world. He is a bribing, criminal, self-worshiping sociopath that has spent over a billion dollars buying web bots and internet hype to promote his sick ego.

Kyle_reese
• Musk bought Twitter because Musk was convinced that Twitter, Google and Facebook controlled all of the politics and thoughts on the internet. Larry Page, co-owner of Google was Musk’s boyfriend and Zuckerberg would do what the VC’s told him to do. Musk thought he could use Twitter to make the world think he was a “GOD”. He thought he had it all wrapped up for the DNC, but that backfired, now Musk thinks he has it all wrapped up for the GOP but his GOP people have the lowest ratings in history..oh well...

kcox1980
• I honestly thought it was cool as hell when he first stepped up to offer help and had his engineers start working on a submarine to get in there and get those kids out. I was like, "Hey, here's a billionaire stepping up and using his money and influence to do some actual good!" Then, his incredibly childish reaction when cave experts started pushing back on the idea of a sub and especially how he talked about the literal goddamned hero that actually went in the and got the kids out...like, Jesus dude...

u/gaeee983 avatar
gaeee983
• I almost did not believed it when I heard it.. Like seriously? Of all the things you can do with your time an immeasurable wealth..


u/ShartinginWalmart avatar
ShartinginWalmart
• I think he wanted to be the hero that people were calling him at the time. When his assistance was refusedz his childish nature came out


TerribleCustard
• Yes. I work at a space museum and I’ve followed him since the very beginning of SpaceX. We were already talking about “good Elon / bad Elon” but it was the Thai cave incident that pushed myself and my coworkers past the point of giving him any benefit of the doubt. It’s also when the general public turned.

Sargent_Profer
• Elon Musk spends millions of dollars attacking each person that exposes him as the fraud that he is. Musk buys articles and SEO on Google, YouTube, Gawker, Gizmodo, MSNBC, etc. and hires private investigators to destroy the lives of anybody that writes the truth about him. Musk also has millions of nodes on ai bot farm “Data Centers” that just pump out hype about himself in any forum that exposes Musk

u/LadyFoxfire avatar
LadyFoxfire
• That was the major turning point, yeah. There were people calling him out before then, but they were largely regarded as cranks. But the cave rescue was blatantly about Elon wanting to be the hero and thinking he knew better than the experts, and getting vindictive when they told him to go away.


u/Careless_Studio_1293 avatar
Careless_Studio_1293
• There were probably earlier clues for those paying close attention, but I think the first big sign that many people noticed was 2018, when he called the diver who helped save 12 Thai children trapped in a cave a pedo, all because he wanted to be the one who saved them. Showed his ego was more important to him than the lives of children in danger.


Nugeythefloozey
• I think his downfall began whenever he started talking about your own area of expertise.
For me, when he started talking about his tunnels and hyperloops. He aimed he could build it for half the price of regular tunnels/trains, based off iffy assumptions and overly optimistic economies of scale. I have some expertise in transportation planning, and his ideas were fundamentally flawed, and completely infeasible. That got me skeptical about the things I knew less about (spaceflight, payment processing, electric vehicle engineering), and I saw that those communities generally had similar criticisms of Musk.


Powersurge-
• My area of expertise is Path Of Exile 2, I could tell almost right away that he was bullshitting. What a fake ass piece of shit, I sort of just took him at face value about hyperloops, electric cars, rockets because i know nothing about those subjects. Now i know for 100% certainty he is a liar.


u/Sceptix avatar
Sceptix
• He talked about electric cars. I don't know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius. Then he talked about rockets. I don't know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I've ever heard anyone say, so when people say he's a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets.


Semisubterranean
• Exactly. My expertise is in PR/communication. When he fired the communication team at Tesla in 2020 was the emperor-has-no-clothes moment for me. I remember reading a 2018 report about cover ups of safety violations at Tesla (from Reveal) that was concerning, but his PR people did an admirable job of responding to the claims. Since 2020 though, he hasn't had anyone to help him sound like a normal human. I am convinced he has always been who we see now (especially considering his family background), but there was at one time a group of people who helped him seem like a well meaning genius. He did not value their work. If there were any normal people left to filter his BS before it could effect his public image, he would have never gone on SNL in 2021. Even people who didn't pay attention to tech news got to see just how weird and unfunny he was. It was like a slow motion train wreck for his reputation. I mean, if he had anyone normal in his life he listened too, he definitely wouldn't have accepted the role of pedophile priest.


u/Thatrebornincognito avatar
Thatrebornincognito
•In my opinion, I once thought of him in a generally positive way. Then a neutral way. Then came the Thai soccer team trapped in a cave. He sent a mini-sub to technologically rescue them. It could never have worked. But he was so angry that a diver did the job that he called the diver a pedo. He has never recovered in my book, and he's done a lot worse since..


u/hellshot8 avatar
hellshot8
• its pretty funny that basically everyone agrees that the cave thing is when the facade cracked


Needmoresnakes
• I think before that he was mostly getting attention for things he had control over like announcing projects his businesses were undertaking. PR teams get a heads up for that stuff and can try to make sure it lands just right. The Thai cave debacle was on the fly. I'm pretty sure him spouting random, potentially wildly unfeasible ideas was what he always did but normally it happened in board rooms or via 2am discord messages to a team that was prepared to nod and treat him like a genius then let him down gently later if it was a stupid idea.


u/Kimmalah avatar
Kimmalah
• He didn't just call the rescue diver a pedo, he hired a private investigator to try and dig up some kind of dirt he could use to smear the guy further.

Dstln
• Yep, this is it. His peak was around the time with the Australian batteries and Model 3 launch, then he lost the plot. You can give a startup multiple chances. But he continued to lie non-stop about the products and timelines to the point where it was unquestionably false and deceptive. Then Twitter, the constant drugs, refusal to acknowledge who made you successful and wealthy, moving to Texas to avoid taxes and child support, endless rotating partners and sleeping with the devil for tax breaks and favoritism. He decided to go the way of his father instead of helping humanity.


u/Drow_Femboy avatar
Drow_Femboy
• You were a victim of his PR / propaganda. That image really started to crumble as a result of the infamous cave diving incident, where he offered a bunch of dumb ideas and then publicly called the rescuers pedophiles when they didn't include his dumb shit in their rescue.


u/Baidaru2017 avatar
Baidaru2017
• This is the first time I had the thought that maybe Elon wasn't actually one of the good guys - the cave diving incident.


u/JaggedMetalOs avatar
JaggedMetalOs
• It should have been clear when he announced the hyperloop that he wasn't an engineering genius...


u/PandaJesus avatar
PandaJesus
• This was it for me. As a huge proponent of public transit, seeing him talk about tunnels for cars as a solution to traffic made me realize that oh actually if you’re a rich dipshit you can do anything without people telling you how stupid your ideas are.


Pipe-International
•When he got jealous of the diver who rescued the Thai cave kids. They put their lives on the line to save those kids, it could have gone horribly wrong, but he got them all and then this clown Musk called a real life hero a pedo, da fuq? Be wary of people like that, their ego is more important to them than anything else


u/Time_Sundae802 avatar
Time_Sundae802
• this is super late. other comments already up top so it'll be buried. his basically secretary handled everything. she was a buffer between his actual self and his public image. at one point she asked for a raise/promotion for her work. instead he fired her and started to handle it himself. that's when his downfall began, he started showing his true self all along. his "good" image was always just Mary Beth Brown filtering and rewording

https://www.educator.com/news/why-elon-musk-fired-his-long-term-assistant-who-asked-for-a-raise/

traveler_
•Many people are citing the 2018 cave diving comments as when people realized he was up his own butt and self-satisfied.But for me it was his first interview with Colbert in 2015, nothing I remember as being concrete, but clues about his character really pinged my meter and I never trusted him after that.


u/Practical_Location54 avatar
Practical_Location54
• I don’t know if it was that video, but I remember once the host asked me something in the likes of « how do you do it all? » and his answer did not include the mention of the thousands of people busting their asses off in his company. For me, that was the moment.


PmUsYourDuckPics
• He’s always been an attention seeking narcissist, back in 2000 he crashed his McClaren trying to impress Peter Thiel, he lost control of it because he didn’t know how to drive a car with that much power and could have killed then both.He was later kicked out of PayPal while he was on a flight to Europe because his ideas were so bad and reckless, he wanted to rename PayPall “X.com” or something like that, and he’s been bitter about it ever since.

Elon read a lot of SciFi as a kid and thought the dystopian societies were something to aspire to, he’s a racist prick, who thinks he’s Tony Stark or Batman, but is more like Doctor Doom. He just has very good PR (manipulation).


Simcity4000
• back in 2000 he crashed his McClaren trying to impress Peter Thiel, he lost control of it because he didn’t know how to drive a car with that much power and could have killed then both.

Oh no! 😟


u/DustyRacoonDad avatar
DustyRacoonDad
• Well, in 2002 he did exactly what I would have done if I suddenly got rich from selling a company at that time. He bought a McLaren F1 and a fighter jet.

After that, we are very, very different people.

He never became a great software developer. He never became a great engineer. He was never a great manager, and he is not really a great CEO either.

He is a good salesman and marketer, as long as you only watch the presentations and not his actual behavior.

In the real world, he has always treated the people working under him poorly. He demands brutal hours, sets impossible expectations, and fires people when things go wrong. That worked in private companies because the people around him were mostly professionals who did not want to damage their careers by speaking out publicly.

He basically created a revolving door around himself, and people tolerated having a terrible CEO because the industries involved were things they genuinely cared about: cars, space, and other ambitious projects.

But as that excitement fades and he becomes more of a celebrity, more of his personal behavior and long-standing issues with other people have become visible to the public.

He is the same person he was 25 years ago: taking credit for work done by the people around him, believing he deserves everything because he thinks he earned it all himself, and constantly talking down to others.

The difference now is that more people see him the way the people who worked around him always did, instead of seeing him as some mythical figure promising cool things like EVs, rockets, or traffic tunnels.

The_Truth_lady
• SpaceX is another Elon Musk ego trip vanity project. His rockets blow up. His staff sues him for sexual and racial abuse. His only income from Spacex is for launching spy satellites that spy on citizens. His 'STARLINK' media service is just a propaganda controlled privacy harvesting system. His satellites clog up the sky for astronomers, pollute the weather, screw up other communications, are war tools, fall out of the sky and are unregulated.

Musk and his SpaceX people have no idea what they are doing according to every major NASA employee. Their satellites are easily hacked and every major foreign nation has those satellites targeted to be shot down as soon as war breaks out. Musk's scam story about "colonizing Mars" is just a PR smoke-screen to hide the fact that all SpaceX does is privacy abusing spy satellites! The guy that created the largest online drug and murder-for-hire network did it at SpaceX.

Elon Musk has no idea how a rocket actually works. SpaceX Rockets have blown up more than any other rocket company and destroyed billions of dollars worth of nature, atmosphere, carbon burn and technology. One SpaceX rocket launch creates more atmospheric damage than 2000+ chimney fires.

Satans_StepMom
• The second he became well known, hes always been a piece of shit people just fell for propaganda and are now realizing that

Moppermonster
• When he started having kids "to promote the survival of the white race" and gave them weird names, showing they were just items on an agenda for him.

The diving incident did not help.

Ztarlight12
• For me it was after he bought Twitter and unbanned Trump’s account.


IanDOsmond
• The Thai cave thing, and he just spiraled and collapsed into the world's most embarrassing James Bond villain.

At which point people began looking more closely and realizing that he has never been as great as his reputation even to start with.


u/Ac1dfreak avatar
Ac1dfreak
• Failed Promises (pre-2018)

2012: Musk claimed Tesla would never need to raise additional capital. Tesla has raised billions since.

2014: Promised humans could reach Mars in 10-12 years. That window closes in 2026 and hasn't happened.

2014: Announced Hyperloop, implying SpaceX/Tesla involvement. Hyperloop One raised $450 million over nearly a decade, achieved a max test speed of 100 mph against the promised 700 mph, and shut down in 2023.

2015: Began promising fully self-driving vehicles were 1-2 years away. That promise has been recycled continuously for over a decade.

2016: Promised Level 5 autonomous Teslas capable of driving unmanned from Los Angeles to New York by 2018. Never happened.

Personal Life

His first wife, Justine Musk, wrote publicly after their divorce about their marriage. She described him as controlling, said he told her at their wedding reception "I am the alpha in this relationship," and that he treated her like an employee.

He has fathered at least 12 children with multiple women, including two with a subordinate employee at Neuralink (conceived while they were in a working relationship), which was reported by the Wall Street Journal in 2023.

His transgender daughter Vivian Wilson has publicly distanced herself from him, called his businesses a "Ponzi scheme," and said he "wasn't there" as a father during her childhood. She legally changed her name specifically to remove any association with him.

False Attribution / Origin Story Disputes

Musk is widely described as a "Tesla founder" but he was not. Tesla was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003. Musk invested and joined the board in 2004. He later negotiated a settlement that entitled him to call himself a co-founder, which Eberhard publicly disputed bitterly.

Similarly, his role in PayPal is often overstated. He was CEO of X.com when it merged with Confinity to form PayPal, but was removed as CEO by the board before PayPal became PayPal.

He has repeatedly claimed to be a "self-made" billionaire, though his father Errol Musk owned an emerald mine in Zambia. Musk has denied the mine funded his early ventures, but his own mother acknowledged the family was wealthy.

Labor and Management (2010s)

Tesla faced accusations of anti-union activity throughout the 2010s. A 2019 National Labor Relations Board ruling required Musk to delete an anti-union tweet and Tesla to rehire a worker fired for organizing.

Multiple former Tesla employees described a culture of extreme pressure, mandatory unpaid overtime, and retaliation for complaints.

Dity_Elon
• Lithium ion batteries: Cause wars, rape and genocide in the Congo, Afghanistan and Bolivia from the corrupt mining deals involved with mining lithium and cobalt; are insider trading-owned by ex-CIA boss Woolsey and DOE Boss Chu;  excrete chemicals that mutate fetuses when they burn; destroy your brain, lungs and nervous system when they burn; kill the factory workers who make them; cause Panasonic to be one of the most corrupt companies in the world; poison the Earth when disposed of; can't be extinguished by firemen; poison firemen when they burn; are based on criminally corrupt mining schemes like URANIUM ONE; Have over 61 toxic chemicals in them; come from an industry that spends billions on internet shills and trolls used to nay say all other forms of energy; are insider-trading owned by corrupt U.S. Senators who are running a SAFETY COVER-UP about their dangers. Apple products with lithium ion batteries have been exploding and setting people on fire; over time the chemical dendrites inside each battery grow worse and increase the chances of explosion as they age -
LITHIUM ION BATTERIES BECOME MORE AND MORE LIKELY TO EXPLODE AS TIME GOES ON AND AS THEY AGE AND THEIR CHEMISTRY DEGRADES!!

"Bad Guys" have figured out how to make them explode remotely; have their dangers hidden by CNN and MSM because pretty much only the DNC people profit from them; are the heart of Elon Musk's stock market scam. The Obama Administration promised Silicon Valley oligarchs the market monopoly on lithium ion batteries and the sabotage of fuel cells in exchange for campaign financing and search engine rigging; United States Senators that are supposed to protect us from these deadly products own the stock market assets of them so they protect them and stop the FDA, OSHA, DOT & NHTSA from outlawing them.

WRITE YOUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVE AND DEMAND THAT LITHIUM ION BATTERIES BE MADE ILLEGAL TO SELL! NiCAD and Hundreds of other battery chemistries DO NOT have all of these problems but Lithium Ion batteries get a monopoly because of politician insider trading ownerships. A recent fire on U.S. Highway 101 near Mountain View, CA, burned the driver alive and killed him. In Florida two kids died in a Tesla, burned alive, screaming in agony. A man died in agony in a Tesla crash in Malibu that set Malibu Canyon on fire. A young woman, at the start of life, and her boyfriend were burned alive in their crashed Tesla. There are many more deaths and crashes than you have heard about.

The deaths and the cover-ups are endless. Senators Dianne Feinstein, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris and their associates own the stock in Tesla Motors and/or it's suppliers and mining companies and they cover-up and halt investigations and laws designed to save the public. They, and their crony's, spend over $1B a year to shill and troll hype about lithium ion batteries and cover-up the dangers. Lithium ion EVs are more prone to battery fires.

Experts say that their lithium-ion batteries can fuel hotter fires that release toxic fumes and are more difficult to put out. Lithium ion fires keep reigniting which explains why it takes so long and requires copious amounts of water or foam (it is an electric fire, after all) to smother the flames. Tesla employee Bernard Tse and his team warned Elon Musk about these dangers in 2008 and they got fired and/or warned to "say nothing" by Musk. Three top Tesla engineers died in a plane crash next to Tesla offices in San Carlos after two of them agreed to become whistle-blowers.Elon Musk exists because he bribed DNC politicians and Senators Feinstein, Reid, Boxer, Harris, Clinton and Pelosi to give him free taxpayer cash and government resources from the Dept. of Energy and the Calif treasury.

DOE has been covering-up organized crime activities at DOE in which DOE funds are being used as a slush-fund to pay off DNC campaign financiers and to pay for CIA/GPS Fusion-Class attacks on Silicon Valley business competitors of those DNC campaign financiers who DOE staff share stock market holdings with. Elon Musk is a criminal, a mobster, an asshole, a bald fake-hair wearing, plastic surgery-addicted, douchebag, woman-abusing, sex addicted, tax evader. Musk exploits poor people and child slaves in the Congo and Afghanistan to mine his lithium and Cobalt. Musk spends billions per year to hire Russian trolls, fake blogger fan-boys and buy fake news self-aggrandizement articles about himself. Musk thinks he is the 'Jesus' of Silicon Valley. Fake News manipulator Google is run by Larry Page and Larry is Musk's investor and bromance butt buddy. Musk uses massive numbers of shell companies and trust funds to self-deal, evade the law and hide his bribes and stock market insider trading. A huge number of Tesla drivers have been killed; pedestrians and oncoming drivers have also been killed, and Musk covers it up.

The DNC and the MSM refuse to allow any articles about Musk's crimes to be printed because they benefit from Musk's crimes. Musk has been professionally diagnosed as a 'psychotic narcissist.'A 'Silicon Valley Mafia; cartel of frat boy sociopath venture capitalists like Steve Jurvetson, Tim Draper, Eric Schmidt, et al; threaten those who do not support the cult of Tesla or their political candidates. In EVERY blog that you read that mentions 'Musk', at least 1/3 of the comments have been placed their by Musk's paid shills. Musk holds the record for getting sued for fraud by his investors, wives, former partners, employees, suppliers and co-founders. Elon Musk has gone out of his way to hire hundreds of ex-CIA staff and assign them to "dirty tricks teams" to attack his competitors and elected officials who Musk hates.

Musk never founded his companies. Musk's "Starlink" satellites are domestic spy and political manipulation tools - never get your internet from one. Musk stole Tesla in a hostile ownership take-over from Marty the true inventor of the Tesla. The same kind of EMF radiation proven to cause cancer from cell phones exists in massive amounts in a Tesla. Musk can't fix a car or build a rocket and has almost no mechanical skills. If you pull a report of every VIN# of every Tesla ever built and cross reference that with insurance, repair and lawsuit records you will find that the "per volume" fire, crash, death and defect rate is THE WORST of any car maker in history! Musk is a lying con artist and partners with Goldman Sachs to rig the stock market. Sachs has a dedicated team of 18 men who rig stocks and valuation bumps for Musk. Over 1000 witnesses can prove every one of those claims in any live televised Congressional hearing! Senators Dianne Feinstein, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris and their associates own the stock in Tesla Motors and/or it's suppliers and mining companies.

That is why they criminally help cover-up investigations of Tesla! All of this was reported, in writing, to James Comey, Patricia Rich and David Johnson at the FBI. The DNC bosses own the stock in lithium, Solar and EV markets and use kickbacks from those markets (Especially via convoluted campaign finance laundering via Elon Musk) to finance the DNC. The DNC bosses use character assassination as their main political tool against any member of the public who speaks out against their felony stock market scams and PizzaGate-like scandals. The Harvey Weinstein reports by Ronan Farrow show that they have teams of hired goons that they pay to destroy people's lives.

They use Black Cube, Mossad, In-Q-Tel, Stratfor, Gawker Media, Gizmodo Media, Media Matters, David Brock, Sid Blumenthal, NY Times, Google servers, Facebook servers, Podesta Group, Perkins Coie, Covington & Burling and a host of "assassins". It should be a felony to hire character assassins in the USA. DEMAND A LAW and DEMAND the termination of these attack services. IE: Gawker and Gizmodo Media sets-up the attack stories and, in paid partnership with Google, Google kicks their attack links around the globe, in front of 8 Billion people, forever. Google locks the attack articles of its enemies on the front top search results of Google search results forever, on purpose! That is why Google is being terminated in the largest, most well resourced anti-corruption public service take-down in history! Tesla and Musk are protected by shareholders Harris, Pelosi, Feinstein, Brown and Newsom. Panasonic (indicted for bribery and Musk's partner) spends billions of dollars annually cover-up lithium battery fires and battery defects. Fuel Cell cars do not have any of these problems! See more at: https://lithium-ion.weebly.com/

u/Ac1dfreak avatar
Ac1dfreak
• Remembered some more and did some research to iron out the details:

Gaming (2024-2025)

On the Joe Rogan podcast before the 2024 election, Musk claimed he was ranked top 20 players worldwide in Diablo IV. The gaming community quickly pushed back.

When he livestreamed himself playing Path of Exile 2, viewers noticed he appeared to struggle with basic mechanics and made rookie mistakes despite his character being at level 97 and ranked 13th in the world.

He eventually admitted in DMs to YouTuber NikoWrex that he had been account boosting, having other people play and level his characters for him in both Diablo IV and Path of Exile 2. When asked if he'd apologize to the community, he replied "What would I be apologizing for?"

The core criticism is lying by omission: he never explicitly claimed sole credit, but the implication was always there when boasting about his rankings.

On Quake, he claimed on Rogan to have been quietly one of the best players back in the day. A genuine Quake all-star said Musk "wasn't very good" but "still an OG." There's no substantial proof he was among the world's top players.

Coding Credentials

Musk has long cultivated an image as a brilliant engineer and coder. The reality is messier.

At Zip2, his early code was so poorly written that after the company received investment funding, the majority of his code had to be completely rewritten by professional programmers.

The Zip2 computer itself was placed inside a large fake casing to make it appear to investors like an advanced supercomputer, when the underlying program was quite simple.

At X.com (the PayPal precursor), co-founders brought the actual expertise needed to build the product while Musk was out making big promises.

The PayPal / Tesla Founder Claims

Expanding on what I said earlier, Musk claims to have "founded" both PayPal and Tesla. He did not found PayPal; he merged his company X.com with Confinity, which had already founded PayPal. He was then ousted as CEO after just six months because the company was losing money badly under his leadership. He retained his shares and got rich anyway.

The Tesla founding claim was disputed bitterly by actual founder Martin Eberhard and only settled contractually.

The "Self-Made" Narrative

At almost no point in Musk's early ventures was he alone. Zip2 depended heavily on a family friend, Greg Kouri, who provided business expertise and initial investment the Musk brothers lacked entirely. The self-made genius narrative glosses over substantial scaffolding.

----

There's a consistent thread across his gaming, coding, founding stories, and business claims: Musk benefits from the implication of sole genius without explicitly stating it, then retreats to technicalities when caught. The Diablo situation is almost a perfect microcosm of the broader pattern.



AdvancedDay7854
• Showing up at my graduation sauced in 2010 or 11, and turning his honorary degree acceptance speech into a press conference told me that emperor had no clothes. He was accepting a degree from my art school for his work at Tesla but started talking about space instead. Then he asked if we had any questions. The crowd audibly gasped. There was nothing motivational or connected to the school. It was straight up promotional. The only person who had their hand up asked Elon if he was hiring. He flubbed. The crowd laughed. Elon was removed from the stage like the Oscars going to commercial.


48Bills_NY
• He was a sociopath when he came out of the womb, born of a family of sociopaths. But the general public got their first hint with the cave rescue.


u/AffectionatePop05 avatar
AffectionatePop05
• He's the richest man in the world and he joined the US government specifically to cut food aid to the poorest people in the world. Legitimately starving many. His downfall isn't big enough. He shouldn't be allowed in polite society anymore.



u/AggravatingSpread837 avatar
AggravatingSpread837
• First comment that mentions the hundreds of thousands in Africa that Elon and DOGE have killed or put into danger.
A guy whose biggest goal was taking food and medicine from the poorest people on earth in the first weeks of 2025 is still getting wealthy selling brand new Teslas to your neighbors.


u/Anstigmat avatar
Anstigmat
• Given the way Billionaires live I don't think they are in polite society. Who around him is not simply someone he pays or someone attempting to use him (Trump)? His wealth is a prison IMO. I would love to be rich, I really would, but there is a limit to how much money you should have. I don't want to go insane, personally.


Cosmicdeer369
• when he was born into a blood emerald dynasty

ytman
• Yeah in racially arpathied nation at that. To an incestuous father as well.

u/ZachRyder avatar
ZachRyder
• Shoutout to Thunderf00t for being on Elon's neck since Jul 2016: Elon Musks Hyperloop: BUSTED!


u/ApprehensiveOkra9977 avatar
ApprehensiveOkra9977
• 2018, when he baselessly called the guy that was rescuing the cave trapped Thai boys, a pedo. All because his feelings were hurt that they didn’t want to use his solo submarine, because IT DIDNT FIT!


u/bigpaparod avatar
bigpaparod
• When he tried to rescue the kids that were trapped in Thailand with his hastily built and untested submarine. And when actual heroes actually went in themselves and rescued the kids, he called them pedophiles, stomped away angrily, and threw a massive hissy fit is when I first began to suspect he was a pile of shit.


u/Roxylius avatar
Roxylius
• Thai cave incident when he offered dumb ass solution and threw a tantrum when you got called out


Double_Distribution8
• When he said that cave diver was a pedophile. When you accuse someone of being a PDF without solid evidence and/or a conviction to back it up you tend to lose favor with the public and with reddit and you look like an idiot.

Bgtech
• See: https://gotmusked.com/

See: https://stopelonfromfailingagain.com/

See: https://www.tesladeaths.com/

See:https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/elon-musk-twitter-terrible-things-hes-said-and-done

See:https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/11-weird-and-upsetting-facts-about-elon-musk.html

See: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11770025/Tesla-driver-killed-car-slams-firetruck-California-freeway-recall-363-000-vehicles.html

See:https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/elon-musk-twitter-terrible-things-hes-said-and-done

See:https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/11-weird-and-upsetting-facts-about-elon-musk.html

Google, Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, META, etc. exist to mass manipulate populations and run stock market scams for their sociopath owners. Essentially, Google, Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, META, etc. get so much money and so many orders from the CIA/NSA that they ARE the CIA/NSA!!! From INSIDE Google, our team saw Google manipulate the entire internet to hype up Larry Page's "boyfriend': Elon Musk and Tesla, which Google execs owned a portion of, while sabotaging Tesla's competitors. Google illicitly and illegally timed these manipulations with stock market pump-and-dump efforts to exploit insider trading.

That is a felony violation of RICO, Antitrust and other laws. Every single thing that Google does is contrived to harm a competitor, a politician, an employee whistle-blower or some other business adversary. There are no "bugs", "operator errors", "server anomalies" or other media "accidents" at Google. Everything Google does is contrived, at a psychological warfare kind of level, to change a social perception.Google must show its software to FBI, SEC, FTC and our search engine optimisation experts to prove that they did not engage in these crimes. The fact is: We can prove they did the crimes and FBI experts can help us prove it! Google is known as the "Nazi's of the Internet". In a case unfolding in Britain over whether Google wrongly demoted price comparison rival Foundem from its search results in favour of paid-for adverts, Google must now decide which it values more: the algorithms that rank its search results, or its stance that manually fiddling with those results to promote its own paid-for products over rivals' sites doesn't break competition laws. The integrity of Google's ranking processes relies upon all webmasters or website owners having the same degree of access to information about Google's ranking...

Tesla recalls more than 27,000 EVs due to faulty cameras that increase crash risks

Tesla announced a massive recall of more than 27,000 EVs due to issues with the rear-view camera. The company said the fault increase risks of crashing.

This will no longer be the case if information of this kind is made available to some individuals offering commercial services to assist companies to improve their Search ranking. Google is a criminal operation. It's executives have been publicly exposed as participants in horrific sex scandals, money laundering, political bribery and racism. It is time for the bought and paid shill politicians to stop protecting them! - Google spies on competitors and steals their technology - Google runs tens of millions of dollars of defamation attacks against competitors - Google hides all media and news coverage for competitors of Larry Page's boyfriend: Elon Musk -

Google lies to the public about what they really do with the public's data - Google promotes illegal immigration in order to get cheap labor and control votes - Google runs VC funding back-lists against start-ups that are competitive - Google bribes thousands of politicians - Google is a criminal RICO-violating monopoly - Google rigs the stock market with Flash-boy, Pump/Dump and Microblast SEC violating computer tricks - Google pays bribes to politicians in Google and YouTube stock - Google manipulates who gets to see what web-sites, globally, for competitor black-lists - Google has a "no poaching" Silicon Valley jobs blacklist - Google bosses sexually abuse women and young boys - Google bosses run sex trafficking operations in the Epstein and NXVIUM cults - Google bosses control the NVCA financing cartel over start-ups - Google has placed the majority of the corporate staff in at least one White House - Google controls national elections for anti-competitive purposes -

The company "Polyhop", in the HOUSE OF CARDS tv show, does all the crimes that Google actually does in reality - Google's law firms, like Wilson Sonsini, are corrupt conduits for payola and political conduit-relays - Google bribes some politicians with revolving door jobs - Google is primarily responsible for destroying the Bay Area Housing opportunities - Google runs DDoS attacks on competitors by massively crawling their sites - Google boss Andy Rubin runs a sex slave farm according to his own family - Google boss Eric Schmidt was a philandering sex-penthouse owner according to vast news articles - Google executives hire so many hookers that one of them, Mr. Hayes, was killed by his hooker - Google executives sexually abuse so many women that the women staff of Google walked out one day -

In the 2009 White House, you could not swing a cat without hitting a Google insider - Google has paid covert bribes, PAC funds, real estate and search rigging payola to every CA Senator - Google has paid bribes, through its lobby fronts, to halt FBI, SEC, FEC and FTC investigations of Google crimes - Google was funded by the CIA, via In-Q-Tel, a so called "501 c3 charity" which was caught with tons of cocaine - Google gets millions of dollars of taxpayer cash for spying on Americans inside the USA - Google's map service was a spy system paid for by taxpayers money that Google now profits off of - Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein have promised to "protect" Google because their families profit off Google stocks -

Payment receipts prove that Google and Gawker/Gizmodo exchanged cash and staff for Character Assassination attacks - Google VC's and bosses have spent $30M+ rigging the U.S. Patent Office to protect Google and harm Google competitors - Google bribed it's lawyer into position as head of the U.S. Patent office in order to have her protect Google - To rig insider stock trades, Google hides negative Tesla stories and pumps positive Tesla stories on "push days" - Google and Elon Musk Co-own, co-invest and co-market stocks covertly while running anti-trust schemes - Google rarely likes, or hires, black employees per federal and news media investigations -

Google hired most of the Washington, DC K Street lobby firms and told them to "do what ever they could" - The film: "Miss Sloane" depicts only 2% of the illicit lobbying tactics Google employs daily - Demands for an FTC and FBI raid of Google, for criminal activity, securities law and election felonies have been filed - Google's David Drummond had his Woodside, CA Quail Road house bugged revealing sex and financial misdeeds - Google, and it’s Cartel (Alphabet, Youtube, and hundreds of other shell-company facades) are a criminal organization engaged in felony-class crimes. Google’s bosses bribe politicians, regulators and law enforcement officials to hold off prosecution.

At Google: Kent Walker, Andy Rubin, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Sergy Brin, Jared Cohen, Yasmin Green, David Drummond and Ian Fette are so enmeshed in sex scandals, election manipulation, and White House bribes that it is hard to comprehend how they can get any legitimate work done. Google executives came from most of the fraternity houses involved in the college rape scandals. Google sells covert character assassination services to politicians and fellow oligarchs. Youtube/Google/Alphabet/Deep State are all the same entity. They conspire to hide news about their corruption and they control most of the internet.

The Musk empire has paid more bribes to politicians than almost any other modern entity. That is why no full investigation of the Musk scams has ever been completed. Google's Eric Schmidt and Larry Page have a bromance relationship with Musk and use the global resources of Alphabet to hide any negative news about Musk assets.The 2008 Department of Energy Cleantech Crash proves that a federal agency was used as just one big slush-fund to pay-off political campaign financiers, operate insider-trading stocks and sabotage those financiers competitors using taxpayer-financed resources! We have used private investigator, FBI resources and deep AI research to reveal that all government staff working on our application were getting quid-pro-quo...they were on the take. (Can anyone point out to us EVEN ONE person who was in the DOE/White House loop who was not working for, invested in, getting a future job from or other wise conflicted?)

What do you do when The U.S. Government convinces you to invest millions of dollars, and your life, into one of their projects. Then their project turns out to be a scam where they had covertly hard-wired the upside to a couple of Senator's and their campaign financier friends. The fix was in and the game was rigged to use a government program as a slush-fund for friends-with-benefits. We, and the public, got defrauded. Now the damages must be paid for, one way, or another. Every one of the insiders who did get government funding got it in the exact same size and order as their covert political campaign funding and stock market bribes to the deciders. Chamath Palihapitiya and other Silicon Valley insiders have now exposed the fact that Greylock, Kleiner, etc. are just a VC Ponzi Scheme! in this whole mess.

Musk used crooked Senators to get his funds. Those Senators and government agency bosses were financed by, friends with, sleeping with, dating the staff of, holding stock market assets in, promised a revolving door job or government service contracts from, partying with, personal friends with, photographed at private events with, making profits by consulting for, exchanging emails with, business associates of or directed by; one of those business adversaries, or the Senators and politicians that those business adversaries pay campaign finances to, or supply political search engine manipulation services to. Elon Musk is notorious for getting Department of Energy money by bribing public officials and placing his friends: Steven Chu, Matt Rogers, Steve Westly, Steve Spinner's 'special friend', etc. on the staff of the Department of Energy and in the White House.

We have FBI-class records, financial tracking, emails, stock market relay records and other forensic data that proves it. We can swear, warrant, certify and prove these assertions in front of Congress in a live Congressional hearing or Civil Jury trial, given non-compromised legal backing. If you think you have bribed the same number of Senators, bought a President and taken over most of the Department of Energy like Musk did... go for it! In this day and age, with every citizen able to track every public figure, with FBI-quality databases, on their home computers, it might be a crash-and-burn but you are welcome to try. Lithium metals, and other rare earth mining materials, are monopolized by Elon Musk and his Silicon Valley Cartel, in rare-earth corrupt mining scams. Lithium's widespread use in cars is hindered by a challenging obstacle: upon multiple charge-discharge cycles, fractal filaments called dendrites always grow through the electrolyte from the negative to the positive electrode and short-circuit the battery from the inside, thus guaranteeing that Tesla Cars will eventually all explode. Musk and Panasonic have known this since 2007 (They are "dumping" the batteries via Tesla) and have paid U.S. Senators, who own stock in Tesla, to cover it up.

The lithium fires and toxic vapors are a major safety concern because they have killed, poisoned and injured too many citizens. Musk gets away with his scams because he pays U.S. Senators bribes with stocks in his corporations and has a thousand crooked Goldman Sachs investment bankers selling his hair-brained schemes to your parents pension funds. Tesla is known as "the official car of douche-bags". The safety defect cover-ups on the Tesla are extreme. Musk's narcissistic trophy-wife mom and his extremist father (who got his young sister pregnant) are thought to be the cause of Musk's racism and sociopath behaviors.

He is the #1 crony capitalist government mooch in America and has received billions of dollars of your tax money to help him buy his mansions, starlets and sex parties. His cars and rockets blow up, his tunnels are unsafe, his satellites spy on consumers and his brain chip company tortures small animals. He swiped all of his technology from someone else and has never come up with his own inventions. Space-X is just a domestic spying company. Don't buy Musk's bullshit about Space-X doing any good deeds. Everything Space-X launches is to spy on the poor folks on the ground and monitor their internet. Also, Musk's Neuralink company tortures small animals to try out Musk's pseudo-science mind-reading chips. Tesla cars have been found to have a vast number of electronic and mechanical defects that cause crashes, fires, explosions, toxic exposures and DEATH! Elon Musk is THE CRONY CAPITALIST GOVERNMENT MOOCH KING taxpayer funds leech of the world. See more at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Tesla,_Inc.

DW496
• That's why so much work has to be put in to delete all those files and shred all those papers!


BitParking6357
• probably when he started doing sh*tloads of Ketamine


u/mrev_art avatar
mrev_art
• He should be taxed at 90%


u/Radiant_Foot_7657 avatar
Radiant_Foot_7657
• It’s so weird to think he went from the guy who we thought would solve so many problems and was just genuinely cool like Tony Stark to what he is today. It definitely started when he called that dude a pedo during the cave rescue. He never was the same

u/Impossible-Fix-3237 avatar
Impossible-Fix-3237
• When he accused the rescuer of the boys stuck in the caves in Thailand a pedophile


u/Trademen avatar
Trademen
• In hindsight he probably had a good PR team. He had a pretty general 'tony stark' vibe going for a while, which is exactly what he wanted. I think at some point just before Covid the masked slipped and we are seeing what he has always been.


u/Willing_Soup_5656 avatar
Willing_Soup_5656
• Yeah this is it. Robert Downey jnrs Iron Man was huge. His PR team capatilized on this. Portrayed him as a philanthropist rather than a billionaire. The Thailand Tham Luang cave rescue was when everyone started to remember he's just a useless billionaire


u/AnalystOdd7337 avatar
AnalystOdd7337
• I remember the sentiment around him shifting when smoked weed on Joe Rogan's podcast. And then it all went downhill when he started voicing his political opinions.


OutrageousSummer5259
• Absolutely it's when he started defending trump that everyone turned on him


PrisonerInUniverse
• The reveal of Cybertruck was such an ugly eyesore it me snap out of it.


u/blackmobius avatar
blackmobius
• A bunch of kids got stranded in a pitch black cave out in Thailand and Elon offered to save them with a high tech submarine. Before he could get it done though, a thai scuba diver stole his thunder and tescued them instead(?) I honestly forgot the specifics and the details BUT instead of being happy that the kids got saved, Eon immediate accused the diver of being a pedo. Id say the tide shifted against Elon really fast from there

u/DrColdReality avatar
DrColdReality
• He was always falling. Some of us knew almost from the start that he was about 90% bullshit, just barely above the level of a con man. But people who are scientifically/technologically illiterate (and unfortunately, that's a hefty percentage of the US population) thought he was Tony Fucking Stark or something.

But as he's gotten more famous, it has become apparent to more and more people that he never delivers on most of what he claims and that he is not a nice person on top of it. Then he went Full Fascist, cementing his place as a despicable human being.


-Nyarlabrotep-
• Since the paypal/ebay days. He's always been a joke supported by family money.


Gweiis
• In France at least, that's from the salute during trump investiture. Before that, i believe he was seen mostly favorably, and there were a ton of Tesla. Then, people stopped, and stickers "I bought before Elon did this" started appearing. There was a real shift at this time.



u/der_innkeeper avatar
der_innkeeper
• When he publicly stated the goal was to spell "SEXY" with the Tesla car models. It should have been readily apparent at that point that he was all frat bro douche, and should be handled accordingly. At least Bezos keeps his mouth shut.


u/coeruleus avatar
coeruleus
• The Thailand pedophile thing was when he most obviously revealed himself as a shithead. For me, in addition to that, he also revealed himself as an idiot on "battery day" in 2020. Table salt? Seriously? And that announcement came shortly after his solar roof BS. Neither of them were in any way seriously researched and none of the valid questions about the technologies were even attempted to be answered in even the slightest way. So that proved that the rumors were true and he actually knows nothing and can't comprehend things either.


u/OldSkoolAK avatar
OldSkoolAK
• It was never a downfall. Net worth does not measure a man, try and think of an extremely wealthy person who's actually a decent person. Hes always been a POS



u/Pleasant_Cloud1742 avatar
Pleasant_Cloud1742
• The soccer kids in a cave thing. How does he call the hero who rescued him a “pedo guy?”


Hikki77
• Diver incident for those with any basic critical thinking skills. A person of his influence shouldn't be acting like a silly brat like that.


u/JeribZPG avatar
JeribZPG
• He’s just a semi-grown kid that wants to do the cool sci-fi stuff he grew up reading/watching as a kid.
Most people learn it’s pretend and separate it from their daily life. He still wants to live it. It’s stopped him maturing emotionally, so he still does dumb, irrational things (some that are incredibly destructive to society). So ultimately I think it’s just his absolute immaturity that wears off as the rest of us grow up!


u/SalletFriend avatar
SalletFriend
• He fired his PR team and decided he didnt need any PR assistance. Which is sort of like saying, he has always been a fuckwit and we just know better now.


Lpkzach92
• I think at some point the mask finally came off and he was exposed for the South African racist piece of shit he is, it’s especially alarming when you find out that his own father married Elon’s stepsister. This is truly a fucked up family and Elon Musk for a while there was just good at hiding it. Did anyone else see those emails of Elon Musk begging to go to Jeffrey Epstein‘s Island that he sent on Christmas of all days?


Mustscience
• He’s always been like this, it just took us a long time to realize. The clues were there.


u/No-Stretch-8563 avatar
No-Stretch-8563
• there were three things that happened all around the same time, his divorce, his trans daughter disowning him, and he wasn't invited by Biden to a green energy conference due to the recent buzz around his transphobia. I'd also note that Tesla is heavily driven by hype and he was losing hype among his liberal admirers at the same time as getting fucked by the production challenges and failures of the cybertruck and he knew he needed a new crowd to hype him up (this is just a personal theory of mine the first 3 are pretty well documented). Shortly after all that he got involved in the 2024 election as any canceled divorced middle age man who needs devoted followers does and it all went downhill from there.



u/BebbleCast avatar
BebbleCast
• It was when he said he would save those kids with a sub and then proceeded to call their leader a pedophile


BadNewzBears4896
• When he called the Thai rescue cave diver a pedophile.


u/ForsakenResist8416 avatar
ForsakenResist8416
• Thai Cave rescue was the really clear, transparent moment.


Dkonigs
• To me, the big "switch" occurred right around the time a certain sexual harassment accusation story was breaking, which quickly left the news cycle and hasn't been heard about since. That's when his online political rhetoric did a complete about-face. (This happened some time before the "did dumb things and ran his mouth off about some possibly-creepy British guy during a cave rescue" situation that everyone else likes to point to.) Of course the moment he bought Twitter and was given an unfiltered megaphone, it all kicked into overdrive.


OwlLadyFace
• Birth. Elon’s Daddy owns an emerald mine & pulled a Woody Allen w his step daughter. Man was always going to be shit

rrhunt28
• He was probably always a terrible person with a good marketing team.

u/numbersthen0987431 avatar
numbersthen0987431
• Around 2016-2018, he started to get addicted to Twitter and social media. Before this, he used to avoid it like the plague, and only used it sparingly, and people didn't know about his personal thoughts. Then he started to use it all of the time, and he got addicted to it, and it's fueled his ego. Creating a feedback loop of stupid and derangement, and he is so insanely rich and powerful now, that literally no one on earth can check him


u/Senor_Arroyos avatar
Senor_Arroyos
• Ketamine's a helluva drug



u/Sudden_Brush7494 avatar
Sudden_Brush7494
• As others have mentioned, the Thai Cave situation and his petty responses were the moment for a lot of casual fans when they when the facade of the ‘genius’ came undone. Smart people have bad days too, but the immaturity and defensiveness of his responses were at a level you’d expect from a spoilt child. It’s been downhill since and I don’t think there’s any doubt anymore about who he really is - just another fragile, ego-driven, grifting billionaire that surrounds himself with ‘yes’ men and couldn’t give two shits about anyone else or the environment.


MyJohnnyGuitar
• Oh, that Thai Cave thing with the kids. He thought he knew better. He didnt.


Evid3nce
• He was always a liar and a conman. The only thing that happened is that you started seeing through his grandiose lies.


u/karlware avatar
karlware
• The hyperloop for me. Such obviously nonsense I was amazed people went for it.


R3quiemdream
• The Thai cave thing was the last straw, but over time he started behaving like an asshole around the boring company thing.


u/CaptainMatticus avatar
CaptainMatticus
• He may not be well-liked, but if they price for not being liked is that I get to be the richest man on the planet, then I'd hardly consider it to be my downfall.

I was willing to give him a chance and was excited to see what his solar roof tile system would look like, and then I saw his company fail to make them a reality time and again. And then I saw that was a recurring theme with him, where he'd make fantastic promises and then his company (or companies) would fail to deliver. The only thing that seems to be performing as promised was his SpaceX company, and that's probably because there were oversight committees who would've taken him to task if he squandered tax dollars.

I think a lot of people started to see that pattern of behavior, too, where he'd promise magnificent products and then not deliver, or use his influence to get funding and resources for projects that were physically impossible (like his hyperloop), or somehow manage to create inferior products and services to what was already out there (his Las Vegas tunnel, which operated as being worse than a subway...quite revolutionary). The luster has disappeared and in about 4 years, assuming we have a government that is willing to take him to task, I'd be willing to bet that he's going to lose a lot of his current wealth. He'll still be a billionaire, and he may even be the world's first trillionaire, but it'll get wiped out pretty quickly.

So I'd say at his unveiling of the Cybertruck, when the unbreakable windows were broken quite easily, was a bit of a disaster for him and marked a turn when people were willing to think of him as being a buffoon.


Background_Dot3692
• Yes, epic Cybertryck fail was visually stunning, but people were already clowning on him for that, and public was not on his side at the time. Thai cave thing happened earlier.

I wonder when in timeline is my "OMG, Musk is a tool, not a genius" moment came. For me, his cave diver comments were written, not seen, and did less impact than his bizarre video with Pewdiepie.

Idk why Pewds decided to show him a dead dear calf in the pool, but he laughed unhealthy and histerically about it, with tears, and even more, when he heard that it was a real photo and deer drowned. He was repeating "dead deer, hahaha"... Elon Musk instantly become unlikable and creepy in my eyes.

P.S. I googled, it is the same time as divers, they happened in 2018/2019 NY, and dead deer video was in 2019.


u/AdZealousideal5383 avatar
AdZealousideal5383
• His daughter coming out as trans seems like when he switched to being a far right MAGA guy. Tesla had been LGBTQ-friendly and he had even posted defending it. But something about having a trans daughter turned him way against LGBTQ people and made him go hard right and talk about the “woke mind virus” and other garbage.

To everyone else’s point, the cave thing is when he first came out as an idiot. He hadn’t gone far right but we realized he was not the genius he pretended to be.

JEXJJ
• Mostly him cosplaying as a founder for every company he invested in and forced the founders out

thisislob
• Been thinking about the same, back when SpaceX was founded and Tesla was doing its first things, not to mention many of the other projects he had going on back then, we all believed he was close to a superhero come to the rescue of earth. Holy moly how we were wrong.



u/Fit_Appointment_4980 avatar
Fit_Appointment_4980
• Weird rich kid from a weird rich family.


u/Longjumping-Pay2953 avatar
Longjumping-Pay2953
• You were young and naive, less so now. Dont idolize people you dont actually know



u/JimmyLizzardATDVM avatar
JimmyLizzardATDVM
• When he started espousing white supremacist shit, so like 15 years ago



u/HahaCharlieKirkHaha avatar
HahaCharlieKirkHaha
• When he fired his PR department.


u/865Wallen avatar
865Wallen
• He was always a dork

ThetaCygni
• In 1971

u/RamblingReason avatar
RamblingReason
• The big shifts were buying twitter and preventing unions forming at Tesla.

Both of those events put him in opposition to progressives and left him on the outside of Whitehouse, so he turned towards the right for love so he could use them to get what he wanted and that went about as well as it always does.

Indifferentgoose
• Like people in the comment section say, it was probably the cave incident. Back in the early to mid 2010s I was into techno-futurism and transhumanism. I thought Elon Musk would be THE future for mankind.

But I always liked to look into what the critics say and boy, was he already a brick back then. His lack of actual technical know-how and his methods rieked of narcissism and borderline criminal behaviour. I became quite weary of him and the cave incident 2018 wasn't surprising at all, but it finally revealed his true nature to a broader audience.

u/MaterialDefender1032 avatar
MaterialDefender1032
• He had a good PR team, I suppose. People assumed he was a self-made genius when he was actually a rich nepo baby from the start.

Sort of like how people think Trump is a shrewd businessman when The Apprentice was supposed to be satire poking fun at the fact that he was a notorious loser who couldn't do anything but lose other people's money.


u/1RedOne avatar
1RedOne
• The whole Thai cave / Twitter thing was the end. It was like I realized “oh he thinks he is Tony stark…and isn’t”


u/ProfessionalEven158 avatar
ProfessionalEven158
• Its simple enough. He's made the calculation that purchasing politicians will get him further than good PR, that the pursuit of power is more valuable than the pursuit of brand reputation for the purpose of corporate growth. and he's been correct. His reputation is in tatters but the rate at which his wealth increases has only accelerated.


Shaqtacious
• I first realised he’s actually a dumb rich nepo baby and not a genius when the cave rescue happened.


u/No_Page5201 avatar
No_Page5201
• The Thai cave thing and once he started talking politics more often, became perennially on twitter, eventually bought it ruined it, became a trump simp.


Oyvho
• For some of us, he was already a joke as soon as we first saw him.


FixedLoad
• "...was a child around 2013-14..."  I'm sorry, you lost me right there because I died instantly from old age. 


u/ekkidee avatar
ekkidee
• Look up the scouts in the Thai cave that had to be rescued. He offered the services of his submersible which was nice, but it wouldn't fit through the cave. They told him that, and he threw a hissy fit, and started calling people pedophiles. From there, things went downhill quickly. It was a nice reminder never to put anyone on a pedestal simply due to their wealth.


CatBoyTrip
• when he got high on joe rogans podcast.


Dubl3A
• 9 hrs, and I bet OP won't see this.. For me it's when I read about what he did to Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, the original founders of Tesla, back in 2009. Musk didn't invent shit! He just had a lot of his parent's money...


u/sokratesz avatar
sokratesz
• He was always an eccentric idiot, you just caught on late. Humans really need to stop idolising one another, especially the obscenely rich. Most of them are dickbags.

u/Smooth-Bowler-9216 avatar
Smooth-Bowler-9216
• He was always an arsehole if you read his book, which I did. I finished the book and thought wow this guy could change the world but you’d never call him a friend or want to spend much time with him. He just hid it really well behind a massive fan base that deified him and what he was doing in business. Then he made the Thai cave comment and that was the start of his PR downfall.

u/the_sneaky_one123 avatar
the_sneaky_one123
• I think he was always the way he is. He just had better PR earlier. He probably also had better staff who worked hard to maintain his image and earlier he was humble enough to listen to them. Now he is a drugged out ego maniac. Probably all his staff are yes-people and he has nobody working to maintain his PR contrary to his own wishes.



Willing_Plant4483
• The Thai cave thing and also his "Funding Secured" fraud



u/Scuffy97_ avatar
Scuffy97_
• He is a nepo baby that bought a couple companies with daddy's money. He never invented anything. All he does at his job is harass his employees to work faster while he is high on drugs. He just had great PR, but he has never been cool, just rich and childish.



u/Substantial-Bag1337 avatar
Substantial-Bag1337
• He has always been a poser... I truely believe that he paid his own troll army to hype him up and talked everyone down who criticised him on reddit or Twitter.But even in 2013 it was clear that he was full of shit. He promised a lot and didnt follow through. Eventually people realized that....


u/neityght avatar
neityght
• He has always been a cunt


u/ModeloAficionado avatar
ModeloAficionado
• Calling the rescue diver a p*do is a start.



u/EsotericGreen avatar
EsotericGreen
• For me, it was when I was looking into working at SpaceX - in 2008. The things I heard as a student from a former employee horrified me. 80-100 hour work weeks. Terrible working culture. Abuse of employees, especially those actually building the rockets. That was *2008*.


u/Proper-Mobile-6438 avatar
Proper-Mobile-6438
• I think he lost it when Grimes left him for a trans person.



TastyRobot21
• He was always a joke. Maybe he did something back with PayPal but after that he was just rebranding 1960s vacuum trains and flogging real rocket scientists to exhaustion then taking credit.



u/XComThrowawayAcct avatar
XComThrowawayAcct
• My personal turning point was the Boring Company.

The gist of the company pitch was that tunnel drilling machines are really slow and they wanted to make them faster. That’s good — if a little naïve. Tunnel borers aren’t slow because they’re lazy or stupid, but because, y’know rock is hard.

And this was the root of their error. As the Boring Company became tied to the Tesla and Hyperloop concepts, the pitch became nonsensical. It went from “make better tunnel boring machines” to “we can dig tunnels wherever we want; everyone else was stupid for not doing this.”

You don’t need a degree in geotechnical engineering to know why this is a bad idea. First, not only is rock hard, rock is also usually wet and sometimes not hard at all. Second, despite what promotional renders would have you believe the below-grade environment is not free real estate. Other people have built other things down there and — this is important — people own it! Just like you cannot build a bridge over your neighbor’s property, you can’t build a tunnel under it either.

Their business model, or at least their pitch, went from “innovative and risky” to “premised on a willful misunderstanding of reality.” I suspected at the time, and I think this has been born out, that Elon himself was the source of this lousy strategic pivot.

I have had concerns with other Elon-associated businesses, including Tesla and SpaceX, but the Boring Company was when I realized that I had no interest ever in being associated with this guy who did a cameo in Iron Man 2.


678722
• When he was born.


u/Stardweller avatar
Stardweller
• When he sued to be a founder of Tesla.


KaiSpunkt
• He probably was like this all the time and you all were falling for his PR-Persona. Simple as that.


u/HumanTest6885 avatar
HumanTest6885
• Before the Thai Cave incident was the Top Gear lawsuit



EchoWillowing
• Maybe I am biased against drug addicts, but I think he really started to act weirdly when he started to use more and more marijuana and other drugs. The questionable joke that he offered $ 4.20 per action for then Twitter, before the actual purchase, was like too much of a flaunt for a CEO of a big company. Then he had his sexual affairs, his obsession with fathering more and more babies (he truly believes that "geniuses" like him have some obligation to spread his genes for... erm... "the benefit of humanity". I think he goes to number 11 right now. There was a podast (not Behind the Bastards, but a similar one) that pointed out that his definitive turn to the right wing conspiracies (antisemitism, white supremacism, etc) came with some girlfriend he had who was a very conservative hack. He was always a narcissistic asshole, and his first wife has some first hand testimony about that. But during his first decades of existence his good traits outweighed the bad ones.


OldSports--
• It's not possible to become a billionaire while being a good human being, so i would say he was always a parasite to this world


foggybrowserv2x
• ngl it was the thai cave diver thing, he couldnt stop himself from calling the guy a pedo and the mask slipped for a lot of people after that


u/YeilKhaa avatar
YeilKhaa
• For me, when he launched his personal Tesla into space, I thought, this is the beginning of his villain arc. It served no purpose, it was grandstanding, it was polluting space. This was a bit before the Thai cave thing.


Ok_Satisfaction_454
• He is a White South African whose wealth came from literal slavery and whose wealth continues to come from genocidal child slavery. He invented nothing. He didn't invent Tesla, he bought it. He didn't invent any rockets, he paid scientists to pay them. He invents nothing, his money came from his family owning gem mines worked by again, literal s l a v e s. If you ever thought Elon Musk was cool, you were a child then and weren't taught about Apartheid. Anyone who found out about Elon Musk in adulthood or close enough to know what it means to be an extremely wealthy white South African knew from the get go.


u/DonutGodzilla avatar
DonutGodzilla
• He has always been awful, it's just now you hear more direct communication, and he fired the competent people who once handled his PR.


u/mytinykitten avatar
mytinykitten
• For me it was calling the cave rescuers pedophiles. I didn't pay close attention to him though.


Itsjustmejttp123
• What did it for me was when those kids were stuck in a cave and he pitched a fit because they didn’t want his stupid sub idea. Then he started rumors about the rescuer being a pedo. That’s when I was like ya that guy is a fucking looser


u/Shit_Pistol avatar
Shit_Pistol
• The key factor there is that you were a child. People like Elon thrive on ignorance. But rest assured he was always a massive prick. I’m fairly certain he was born a prick.

Lanky-Reputation8770
• I have never liked/trusted/believed Elon but it's very clear it was when he threw the temper tantrum when they didn't want to use his sub to try and save those kids.  Which BTW was AFTER the divers had already brought out the majority of the kids.  There is a really funny history podcast called Fin vs History that goes in-depth on the subject.



Icecreammodel
• Besides the Thai cave rescue controversy, I remember that time when he said he could obliterate world hunger. The UN prepared a detailed plan and then he just went "nah"


u/Scientalist avatar
Scientalist
•I am not sure. I personally discovered the type of douchebag he was when I accidentally stumbled on all the lawsuits and class action lawsuits against him and his business’s terrible treatment and under payment of employees. That made me go investigate how someone could be so much into saving humanity and all that but also be such a terrible employer who won’t even pay his employees properly. Which that made the whole thing crash for me. I realised that dude is mostly a hype merchant. He is the undefeated king of extraordinary claims and undelivered promises. Remember the Theranos fraud lady? That lady hasn’t even made 1% as many absurd claims as Elon did over the years.



u/darthsploder77 avatar
darthsploder77
• Like other others have said, I had a positive opinion of him until the "kids in the cave in Thailand" incident. That kind of was the first time his real personality was revealed. It's been all downhill from there.


u/WhatsaRedditsdo avatar
WhatsaRedditsdo
• For me it was taking down the kid that tracked his personal plane claiming that people were trying to kill him. Suspicion haunts a guilty mind


u/hunty avatar
hunty
• The turning point was when he smashed all the windows of the cyber truck live in stage.


u/grandfamine avatar
grandfamine
• Pretty sure Musk tried to buy public opinion, and did so successfully until he forced himself into the spotlight and everyone saw firsthand that he's a self absorbed, needy man child.


u/Original_Editor_8134 avatar
Original_Editor_8134
• pedo boygate


u/mappythewondermouse avatar
mappythewondermouse
• The cracks began during his union fighting during obama, then because of that he got snubbed by obama and not invited to some environmental summit and that broke his brain, then it began sliding down and crashed when his kid came out as trans. After the trans thing he vent full supervillain arc. He was part of the oaypal mafia so the underpinning was there but i think we all hoped he would just stick to his IRL tony stark thing



Hot_Cicada_9318
• As others have said, he flew under my radar (as an Aussie) until the cave diving bullshit. Up until then from what little I knew about him my feelings were proabably neutral to positive. The quickly changed to negative - I mean what the? Imagine being one of the richest in the world and you are so fragile you need to denigrate a rescue diver hero.. Ever since then I just keep seeing the seedier side, like the over-promising and under-delivering, the ridiculous Cybertruck, the revelation of his cheating at video games..It just goes on and on. Once the emperor looses his clothes you can't unsee it. Then his bullshit with DOGE. The man is a mess, a very rich mess unfortunately.


Tortugato
• “pedophile rescue diver”


u/Monkey_College avatar
Monkey_College
• Everyone that wanted to know already knew in 2013. He wasn't as unhinged but it was very clear that he was not a nice or admirable person



u/jerrygreenest1 avatar
jerrygreenest1
• To me when he said he’s a gamer and bought a gamer to play his games for the public picture of being a gamer. Only a person who loves to lie can do that.



HaxanWriter
• He was always a fucking joke. You were a kid, as you admit. Which is fine. This ain’t goddamn rocket science.


Morbid333
• I didn't realize there was ever a moment where he wasn't a massive twat


SilverBBear
• LOL I don't think he has changed. I think he has chosen a public persona that suits his business interests the most. We live in a different world to 2012

u/TrinityCodex avatar
TrinityCodex
•When those kids were stuck in a cave and he called the guy who saved them a pedo

u/Evening_Ticket7638 avatar
Evening_Ticket7638
• When he went full nazi with the salutes and everything.

Calamity-Bob
• As soon as he was born I’m an apartheid country to deeply creepy people

u/Financial_Clue_2534 avatar
Financial_Clue_2534
• He’s been shitty to his factory workers. People overlooked it and most of his issues. Once he aligned himself with Trump that was the straw.

u/buttflakes27 avatar
buttflakes27
• He got divorced from his second wife in 2016, and has been exhibiting extremely divorced guy behaviour kinda since then, coming to a public head with the cave rescue thing as others mentioned and just kind of spiralling since then. Think the lowest point was when he was on Path of Exile 2 and people were spamming his DMs to khs. But hes rich so he keeps failing upwards and now hes I guess on track to be the richest man in the world. The universe is unjust and uncaring.

u/Crivens999 avatar
Crivens999
• For me? Acting like a child with the cave thing, and calling the main diver a pedo for no given reason. Massive twat

u/whataboutbenson avatar
whataboutbenson
•I can honestly say I have never liked that man. I first heard of him when he started saying he was going to put a man on mars by 2024 or whatever. That was in 2016. My bullshit meter went off immediately. I knew we were nowhere close to that kind of technology yet and that only the grubbiest type of grifter would promise such a thing. Then he started saying that self-driving cars were a “solved problem.” Again, total bullshit. Then the joint on Joe Rogan, I knew he was just trying to appeal to his mid-20s, white male, “Interstellar is the greatest film ever made,” base, and I could see my friends lapping it up. I asked one of them sincerely if they could buy one of Elon’s chest hairs for $5 would they do it and they told me that I just didn’t understand his vision and that he was the only one trying to take humanity to Mars. I said that man will never put a man on mars. Not in 2024, not in 2054. It caused some genuine tension between me and my friends at the time.

I knew he was going to be a genuine problem when he tweeted that photo of the soldier with the pigeons that he’d edited the red notification bubble onto and made some weird joke. I saw his worshippers lapping it up in the comments even though the soldier was a Wehrmacht. I knew it was a dog whistle even then. Then when Kanye West started saying HH and Elon defended him. So I wasn’t even surprised when he did the Sieg Heil, and there’s 0 chance in hell he was just “throwing his heart to the crowd.”

Weirdly, my friends have all turned their backs on him now. Most after the nazi salute, but the one I asked about the chest hair only turned his back on him when he got caught paying somebody to play that video game for him. Of everything he’s done, THAT’S what made my friend say “actually nah he’s a weirdo.”

bleach_drinker_420
• when he started saying that were 100% in a simulation and was getting interviewed because of it. dumbest thing id ever heard

u/Junior_Lake avatar
Junior_Lake
• https://pca.st/episode/16c50d23-fa95-4895-a519-58d2256bcee2

One of my fave podcasts did a whole special on him and his decline in the public image.

jamiestar9
•Final straw for me was when he responded to Bernie Sanders’s tweet about the ultra wealthy not paying enough taxes. Elon wasn’t directly mentioned by Sanders but he tweeted, “I keep forgetting you are still alive.” Total jerk. I think this was a few years after the Thailand thing.

u/Ok_Row_4920 avatar

Ok_Row_4920
• People realised he's just a idiot and scumbag.



Fturist
• Maybe he was a joke all along, and we didn’t get it until a couple of years ago…


u/heruka108 avatar
heruka108
• when he started supporting Trump, it led to all kinds of character downgrades



ihaveahoodie
• i think he turned to the dark side after that interview where he started tearing up/crying when talking about how disappointed he was that Buzz and the rest of NASA were mad at him for creating Space-x rather than happy to have more space exploration. I personally think that's when he stopped trying to be altruistic and just focused on the money.



u/MythicMango avatar
MythicMango
• at hair plugs


iamskurksy
• I'd never heard of the idiot until the press started talking about him and Tesla. I read some of his public comments, archived press, and did some research. It was immediately obvious he was a man-child. How so many thought otherwise isn't a mystery at all. Sorry, most heroes are actually terrible people, whatever their positive reputation is not their doing, and learning that is all part of growing up.



DigitalMystik
• When Elon started offering his semen to employees in lieu of payment.



u/mze9412 avatar
mze9412
• He was never different but was hyped up back then a lot.



u/Latter-Composer-2609 avatar
Latter-Composer-2609
• I always thought he was a dick. People used to get mad at me for saying so. "He's basically real life tony stark bro, you are just a contrarian bro!" Nope. He's a piece of shit. There is no such thing as a billionaire who isnt a piece of shit. I don't care if their publicist does a really great PR campaign. The world will be a better place when we all finally reach a conscensus that their wealth only has value because we agree it does and they only have power because we believe they do and just all collectivley agree to ignore them back into being nothing special.

u/Yasstronaut avatar
Yasstronaut
• I remember specifically in 2017 everyone in nerddom was still worshiping him and dreaming about buying teslas. So I’d guess 2018-2019



u/badamache avatar
badamache
• I live in Canada. He went to university here, so taxpayers funded 60% of his education. We admire the self made man.

He then seemed to get rich on other people’s great ideas. Like Steve Jobs.

Perhaps his downfall began with being stoned in public. When he bought twatter, we hoped that would allow Tesla to thrive while he ignored it. But Tesla looks doomed.

Worst case: he gets sick and relies on junk science cures like Jobs. Best case for Elon: live out his days Howard Hughes.


OutrageousSummer5259
• When he started defending Trump's policies


PubliCONNIE
• Bro did a whole school report on him and now has to live with that lore in his past forever


u/SoyMiiC avatar
SoyMiiC
• Always been there.


/GuzPolinski avatar
GuzPolinski
• When those shirtless pictures of him on the yacht were plastered all over the internet. Something in him snapped lol

u/Far_Lifeguard_5027 avatar
Far_Lifeguard_5027
• When he thought he knew how to build submarines.


JTiKey
• He turned Starlink off for Ukraine when a former ukrainian diplomat said something bad about Elon

cashmerescorpio
• I used to think he was cool till I actually spoke to him. This was in 2021. I was pretty late to catch on imo.


NiceTuBeNice
• When he accused the dive rescuer of being a pedophile.


Regularfrog_
• 28th of june 1971


u/Robin_Gr avatar
Robin_Gr
• I think it was the cave thing. It was relatively high profile. And the more people were exposed to him in his own words, the more people could get the impression of the true guy and not just this idealised version of a genius billionaire people just sort of assume when they have not heard anything else.


Rake66
• I was an adult when Elon started becoming more visible and I never liked him, so I'd say he was always a dumb piece of shit


Only-Lead-9787
• When his dad decided not to wear a condom.


Nghtmare-Moon
• The pandemic is when he turned from “pro science” to “scientist are lying!”. The trigger? Scientist said we should shut down and isolate at home and suggested he closes his Tesla factory for 2 weeks.


u/Economy-Weakness-774 avatar
Economy-Weakness-774
• He was always a charlatan. Hyperloop was a con job to direct public and private funding away from public transport and towards his “autonomous” electric cars. Was never going to happen, but captured the imagination of a lot of important stupid people who wished it were true, giving him access to capital. Anyone who still wasn’t onto him after the Thai caves was and probably still is an idiot.


CrasVox
• The cave incident for sure made it obvious. But there had been signs before that the guy was actually a huge idiot pretending to know physics and engineering.


u/Icy_Fish_2154 avatar
Icy_Fish_2154
• When he sold X to PayPal and got into PayPal managemt and the promise of PayPal being a better bankong alternative, but it was somehow worse than the worst banks. It lied about how it operated to the US, so wasn't a "bank" and is banned in some countries as an illegal bank.

That's when I first saw he was a bad person. So 2002 for me, is when I was aware of him and knew he was a tech bro of the worst kind.


u/spez_eats_nazi_ass avatar
spez_eats_nazi_ass
• I knew people from what became paypal. Was always a pile of shit.


BaronGreywatch
• About when he started treating his employees like peasant trash. So, as long as he has been around, really. When was that? I didn't pay attention to his rise.


u/gwelfguy avatar
gwelfguy
• The downfall started when he decided to get involved in politics and started to leverage his wealth for right wing causes. Around the same time, his highly questionable personal choices started to get more public recognition, like giving his children weird names.


Shuuto1
• He was basically Bruce Wayne until he went openly republican and bought Twitter. Free fall since that exact moment. He basically thought he would be president by proxy if he helped Trump and he made a fool of himself


glizzygobbler247
• r/space post of him getting 200k likes in 2017 before most people knew what kind of person he is

u/dalziel86 avatar
dalziel86
• Never had anywhere to fall from. There’s no shame in being fooled by this bullshit as a child, but grown-ass adults should have known he was an idiot since forever. He’s never had anything going for him except money.

MisterDumay
• dude has always been a douche

Commander19119
• If you listen to his daughter, Vivian Wilson, he was always like this behind closed doors, so it’s interesting that it took this long to leak out into the public.

u/Live_Location_6534 avatar
Live_Location_6534
• Was the cave diving incident before or after his promise, and then renege, to cure world hunger? Because that's what did it for me


Dock_Ellis45
• The more public he became, the more people disliked him. He was probably always like that from the start. The only thing that changed was that he got infamous enough to be not willing or able to hide it anymore.



u/SerKnightGuy avatar
SerKnightGuy
• For me it was, weirdly enough, his appearance on Meme Review (a popular youtube show hosted by at the time big name youtuber Pewdiepie). To make a long story short, he came across as both kinda dumb and sociopathic. That was the most I'd ever seen of him and it was decidedly not good.


BTM65
• The nazi salute was the end for me. He is a pig.


Probablymagic
• When his kid came out as trans it broke his brain. That made him hate “the woke.” Combine that with the heavy drug use and the ego-fluffing you get when you are surrounded by yes-men and he is the man he is today.


u/To-To_Man avatar
To-To_Man
•You can't fall if you've never been great. He has a lot of money and an image he wanted to build. And he built it quite successfully. But between his contradictions between his imagery and politics, and the people who once idolized him realizing the man he was, it's safe to say his legacy was being a brand.



u/North-Astronomer-800 avatar
North-Astronomer-800
• He cheated and lied on his citizenship application. He needs to be deported.


TheGargageMan
• pedo guy storyline.


Hopeful-Cup-6598
• Most people began questioning his character in 2018, after he threw a truly nasty tantrum when his minisub idea wasn't used to rescue those dozen kids. That idea was only marginally more stupid and dishonest than his hyperloop proposal in 2013, though, which is when a large group of us wrote him off.


u/Repulsive_Drawl avatar
Repulsive_Drawl
• For me, it was when I discovered he has built NOTHING. He was born into money and bullied and bought his way into his image.


u/QueenAlucia avatar
QueenAlucia
• When these boys in the Thai cave got stuck and he basically lashed out and called one of the heroes a pedo and threw a tantrum because his under engineered solution wouldn't work.


Planetafro
• He's always been garbage but I feel like the cliff was Grimes and Ketamine. That's not to blame Grimes but Elon is not an artist in any sense. I think a couple bad trips and some self-realization sent him full Nazi Kanye-style.


Delicious-Income-870
• He was always a dope. Always about his image and trying to convince everyone he's a boy


u/Imaginary_Ad7695 avatar
Imaginary_Ad7695
• The Thai cave situation, he called a diver a pedophile. Very weird.



u/Soggy-Attempt avatar
Soggy-Attempt
• When he came out against his trans son.


Rhetoric_Frederick_
•Every billionaire is inherently sus. Since ever.

Lexi1Love
• You’re right, there was no downfall. He was always a piece of shit.

Careful-Lettuce9239
• I think it started with his emerald baron parents. So...conception?


u/theomegachrist avatar
theomegachrist
• I always hated him because he's not an engineer and pretends to be, but I would say the pedo cave incident made a lot of people look into his career and realize he's no different than Steve Jobs or any other executive and the real engineers were the people he was forcing to work 15 hours a day

• When he started making his own statements rather than going through a PR team. He's ALWAYS been a huge creep with a very loose understanding on the world. He just had a lot of smart people running interference for him in the early years.

Appropriate-Farmer16
• I’d say DOGE was the final nail in the coffin for many with Elon.

u/markhamjoey avatar
markhamjoey
• When did the drugs start?

Chumlee1917
• Truth be told I was starting to get Sus feelings about him when bros were worshipping the ground he walked on in 2012-2014

u/MotoGeno avatar
MotoGeno
• His downfall was that he ever had a rise to begin with. He has invented nothing, and the downfall is inevitable if your whole thing is a grift to begin with.


u/Swords_and_Words avatar
Swords_and_Words
• The Thai cave. Before that everything he said that was stupid could be chalked up to pipe dreams, over enthusiasm, fetishization of futurism, and the fact that he had facilitated what many said was impossible by making Tesla successful at first.

u/waltzbyear avatar
waltzbyear
• This is why you don't worship billionaires, especially ones who pretend to be Tony Stark. I had professors in my engineering program way back then who would constantly talk crap about him (he was always in the headlines). And I recall the science community generally disliking him, and even more so when he sole-authored a patent that was not rigorous at all and didn't make sense in terms of physics. He was always a joke but the Average Joe worshipped him because they didn't know better.

He tried hard to play the bumbling-nerd, who could change the world. People who judge others on shallow things like that ate what he offered up real quick. Also people generally didn't know he was a nepobaby that HEAVILY launched his rise to wealth. He always tried to portray himself as someone self-made.

He's always been a grifter like his buddy Trump.

Runnerkim
• Maybe he was always a jerk and just couldn't hide it anymore


PartTime_Crusader
• I think my turning point was reading reports the Boring company was a giant boondoggle and being actively used to prevent/block useful public infrastructure projects from moving forward. This predated Elons thai cave rescue comments by several years

u/bigflops_ avatar
bigflops_
• It was when he changed his twitter pfp to the cover of Deus Ex. That’s exactly when he started going off the deep end. I remember because I love that game dearly and was horrified

u/AggravatingSpread837 avatar
AggravatingSpread837
• He bought Twitter and bought the election, but we knew he was a horrible person before that. A guy whose biggest goal was taking food and medicine from the poorest people on earth in the first weeks of 2025 is still getting wealthy selling brand new Teslas to your neighbors.

u/Megalesios avatar
Megalesios
• I didn't know much about him before the Thai cave incident, but form what I had heard he was this nerdy inventor/entrepreneur type, I had a neutral opinion of him.

The cave debacle was what showed me what an immature, cringeworthy, narcissistic pissbaby he really is, I think that was the turning point for many. After that, I had a reason to look into him more closely, and discovered that he had, in fact, always been a shitty, shitty person, both personally and with his businesses. He was just better at hiding it up until then.

But that's mostly for the chronically online like myself. For most "normal" people, it probably wasn't until the nazi salutes. My coworker bought a Tesla a few months before that and everytime she brings up the "I bought this car before Elon went crazy" shtick I just think to myself "ah, in 2017 then? Because his far right conspiracy theories, union busting and gag-worthy breeding fetish have been on full display for the whole world to see for years now"

u/front_yard_duck_dad avatar
front_yard_duck_dad
• The day he was hatched out of his egg. Dude isnt human just a total pile of otherworldly apartheid benefitting excrement

u/franzperdido avatar
franzperdido
• First time I heard him speak was when he presented some solar powered roof tiles around 2016 and realized that man cannot speak coherently. Lost all interest, never looked back.

Captaindealbreaker
• For me it was when he started selling those mini flamethrowers as part of Boring's marketing bullshit. It was just an irresponsible and dumb thing to sell and people ATE that shit up. So I started looking into his past and found out he's basically just a rich kid with blood emerald money that lucked into PayPal and a few other ventures that have since funded a gluttony tour of buying companies he has no business leading.

For years prior to the flamethrower thing I had been skeptical of him and never really liked him because everything he said about science or engineering was generally incorrect. Like it was clear from the start that he was just a money guy who was bad with money and had no real education. If you look at the history of his companies, he is almost always their singular problem.

He started selling the flamethrowers at the start of 2018, later that year he called the rescue diver a pedo (sued him twice and won both times btw which is fucking insane), and then the following year his bozo ass revealed the cybertruck by having some shclub from the company smash it's windows live on stage with steel balls...

From there it's just be a nonstop nosedive we still haven't found the floor with.

Obviously the public perception of Elon was carefully curated for a long time and it took some seriously stupid shit on his part to make the curtain fall revealing the piece of shit he's always been. But anyone with common sense had their bullshit alarm buzzing years before the diver pedo incident.

u/theconvohavers avatar
theconvohavers
• The cave incident was the beginning of the end, as others have said. Though there was also a little bit of “benefit of the doubt” with that still, it was such a weird situation. For me though, that’s when I first seriously questioned the image of him being fed to us and started to not really like the guy, though I didn’t outright hate him yet either.

What sealed the deal was his acquisition of Twitter and his multiple crash outs over racism and AI and not being able to take a joke at his own expense but complete and utter willingness to do the same to others. So for me and most I knew at least, it was a slow, agonizing death over the course of like 3-5 years.

u/EnvironmentalAss avatar
EnvironmentalAss
• For a lot it was the salute, for me personally it was the twitter buyout.

u/SlovakianStallion avatar
SlovakianStallion
• He was always a c*nt, just took some time to publicly show.

Evergreengoth
• I mean, a lot of people have always thought he was kinda stupid. It's just that that number has grown as more people see him put that stupidity on display.

No-Wonder1139
• It was his weird meltdown over the kids being rescued from a cave. He didn't care about those kids, at all. He wanted glory for saving them and when someone else did it, he had a public temper tantrum. That was enough.


Vito0117
• Same for me when he called that diver a pedo, because the diver fact checked him about rescuing

dangerd4ddy
• When He stopped being mysterious and eccentric. Roughly around when he bought Twitter and became more vocal. Speak less and people think you are a genius. Speak more and people will realize you're an idiot with a lot of money.

u/Drudwas avatar
Drudwas
• Like most people, it was the Thai cave thing where it became publicly obvious he was a prick. I've never understood why so many people continued to praise the guy after that, as it as such a blatant mask-off moment.

u/Better_Tart_9262 avatar
Better_Tart_9262
• When he started talking to the public. He should have listened to his publicist and stayed out of the public eye.

Keithstonee
• He lied about being good at video games. He betrayed the nerds.

u/Realistic-Buy4975 avatar
Realistic-Buy4975
• For the people who were paying attention it was 2018 with the Diver incident and for those who weren't paying attention probably when he started supporting Trump.

u/Financial-Creme avatar
Financial-Creme
• I did my 4th grade book report on Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal because I thought he was the paragon of success. I didn't know much else a about him, he was just synonymous with the word "rich" to me. My opinion on him has changed a bit since then, to say the least.


SAwfulBaconTaco
• Buying Twitter. It distracted him from his core businesses, and he self-radicalized from too much exposure to its hate and toxicity.


u/opus-thirteen avatar
opus-thirteen
• I believe he means it terms of public reputation. If his IPO fails, it could have a domino effect. His wealth is in stock and loans against those assets (which he probably has more loans against like his boats/house etc). Not holding my breath.


Clearedmycookies
• Its a nice case study of "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt". If Elon just keep his mouth shut in the public, let his PR people do their work for all official responses, that aura could have lasted a lot longer.

JohanGubler
• He's always been a piece of shit. It's just as he became more comfortable being a public-facing figure everyone who isn't a clown started seeing him for what he is: a fraud.


u/DoubleNaught_Spy avatar
DoubleNaught_Spy
• I think he's always been an ass. We just didn't know it until his personality became much more public. And now he's just a full-blown white supremacist.


Userhwon
• When the marketing that made him look admirable was overwhelmed by the facts that he's a douche. Basically the next day, tbh.


Hionkron
• Putting a car in space thinking it’s cool when it was just trash, and calling a man saving kids a pedo just because he did it out in f kindness instead of to grift off it like Elon wanted to do was the “tell”. He always showed signs before but those where huge.


u/Exciting_Run_8932 avatar
Exciting_Run_8932
• I recommend listening to the TrueAnon series about Elon. The dudes been a grifter is whole life but has been showered with undeserved praise.


u/GPT3-5_AI avatar
GPT3-5_AI
• When he union busted his factory despite being the richest illegal immigrant nepo baby on the fucking planet.

u/Loud_Dish_554 avatar
Loud_Dish_554
• Truth was He was never cool though. It was all a con. We just got to know him better .

u/Geschak avatar
Geschak
• I think it started when he started spouting nonsense like humans are obligated to breed. That was already before the Thai cave incident.

u/ArgumentUnited5039 avatar
ArgumentUnited5039
• We just had to get to know him.

u/Hairy-Maximum2994 avatar
Hairy-Maximum2994
• i noticed he sucked when he was trying to promote his stupid ass truck to rural people.

u/Sarabean77 avatar
Sarabean77
• The minute he started flapping his stupid fucking mouth publicly on large social media platforms. It was then that everyone could understand what a fucking moron he is.

Specialeyes9000
• He's a child, a deeply unfunny and inhuman man who wishes he was more than just a rich goofball. So he gets nasty and thinks that makes him a real man. Probably when he keeps telling everyone to fuck more to have more kids when people can barely afford basic necessities. Easy to fuck anyone and not care when you're the richest man on the planet.

u/ninjad912 avatar
ninjad912
• The first thing I saw that made me know how incompetent he was was when he commented on “clean power being irrelevant” because electric cars are still better with bad power than gas cars. While the later part of that is true clean power is still leagues better

Pandemonium_Fallen
• I didn't like him from the start, there was just something about him that made my skin crawl, and I'm AuDHD, so he really had to be putting out some creeper vibes for me to pick up on it. Oh, and he's absolutely NOT on the autistic spectrum, he's a psychopath with brain damage from chronic Ketamine abuse.


Dreamsbrandylashay
• Agreed!

u/bflo666 avatar
bflo666
• It was around then for me, when he built the solar city factory in south Buffalo and under delivered massively while pocketing a huge sum of state money. Figured out pretty quick what his methods were.

u/Solo_Camper avatar
Solo_Camper
• I hated Elon since the Space Elevator days. The concept is so damn dumb that it immediately flagged him as a gormless grifter.

That and the Hyperloop.

u/LV-426HOA avatar
LV-426HOA
• I know I am late but I had to chime in with this: the moment SpaceX cancelled the composite BFR and went with stainless steel Starship. The switch was made to radically speed things up through iterative development and cut costs by avoiding the expense of composite construction. But the whole thing smelled weird to me for reasons that have borne out over time.

All the stated cost savings are impossible to quantify but the thermal advantages of stainless steel were also overstated. This has led to all sorts of compromises to offset the terrible mass fraction of a rocket constructed of incredibly dense metal. Chopsticks, hot staging, 31 engines, all of it is to compensate for a stupid decision Musk imposed on his brilliant engineers.

It's his ego, hubris, whatever you want to call it, but he's too insecure to let someone else make these decisions.

Meanwhile New Glenn, which was waaaay behind BFR is now flying and will probably reach a productive operational cadence before Starship. (I know that NG is smaller and the 2nd stage isn't reusable. This isn't about equivalence, it's about blowing a huge lead.)

anon-a-SqueekSqueek
•His iron man PR BS was already fading for a variety of reasons, but he made a comment along the lines of "we'll coup whoever we want" in relation to US involvement in a soft coup in bolivia.... bolivia is a big producer of lithium, which Elon obviously needed for electric cars.

I found the sentiment so disgusting I literally destroyed his book (a family member had gifted to me) and threw it in the trash right then. Fuck Elon, I've only been proven right in my hatred for him more and more over time.

ConvictJones
• I think for most people it was after his Nazi salute.

NotSinbad
• Before he got into politics, he was just the quirky weird rich guy who’s really into tech and space. After he got political and started opening his mouth more in public, he started to show himself as a joke. And it’s when all his WEIRD weirdness started coming out.

NeilDegrassiHighson
•Probably when he mocked his classmate for having a father who just died and the kid pushed him down a flight of stairs. When your own father shows up to the hospital, learns what happened, and goes, "Oh yeah, no, he's just lucky the kid didn't murder him." you know you were cooked from birth.
The guy never had a chance to be a good guy.  He's of sub-standard intelligence, but was raised believing that he was a genius who was naturally superior to everyone.

Aspophilia
• After he took over Tesla and demanded to be named as a founder. 2009/2010ish. He likes to take credit for inventing things he didn't. Gross behavior. Everything I have learned from that point has just been confirmation and gotten increasingly worse.

Cottontael
• Generally speaking, it's about knowledge proximity. When he was talking about electric cars and spaceships most of us did not know enough to call him out. But as hungry as his ego is, he started inputting himself into everything. The cave incident others mentioned, the twitter politics, even when he claims to play video games when he so very obviously doesn't. Once you see how you know more about something he claims to be a master in, it crumbles.

u/cab1024 avatar
cab1024
• When he helped destroy the US by leading the DOGE department and doing nothing good that was promised.

Caleb-Wendt69
• When he opened his big mouth and started weighing in on politics

Any-Inevitable1890
• He was never a good guy or someone to look up to.

Due_Guarantee_7200
Everyone’s downfall began when we gained unfettered access to everyone’s every internal thought via social media.

u/Yd1891 avatar
Yd1891
• When his mom didn’t swallow him

u/Interesting_Sun_6993 avatar
Interesting_Sun_6993
• I dont follow his business ventures and stuff too much but id say when he started making these massive claims and not delivering like the hyperloop and some tesla car stuff. Im sure it was to boost stock value or whatever. Then the SNL appearance was just absolutely embarrassing. Then the twitter purchase, because the snowflake cant handle left leaning tweets that hurt his feelings. Then the alignment with the Trump admin shows him to be a bafoonish cartoon villian.

DW496
• He was always douchey, and became a cosplay version of Tony Stark when Iron Man came out and was popular. I really think he saw it and was so enthralled by the idea of it that he made it into his play-act persona, probably because he can't distinguish fantasy from reality. He jumped the shark when he accused some random guy trying to rescue people in a cave of being a pedo because he was mad that he was not, in fact, Tony Stark. Now he's just a manifestation of the cancer of unregulated capitalism. AOC cometh.

Wizzard419
• When he confused luck with skill and then decided he was a tech god.

u/Worried-Macaroon-532 avatar
Worried-Macaroon-532
• The point when I started doubting his good guy act was when he called someone a pedophile when they said his submarine plan wouldn't work to save the kids trapped in the caves in Thailand. It's been all down hill ever since.

tinker_townie
• Right around the time he accused somebody of being a pedo for rescuing kids out of an underwater cave because nobody wanted to wait for Elon to build a stupid submersible.

u/PositiveGloomy2546 avatar
PositiveGloomy2546
• When he called the scuba diver trying to help a pedophile after nobody wanted to use his dumb contraptions to get the kids out

u/Reasonable-Plate2982 avatar
Reasonable-Plate2982
• When he started to be wanted for questioning on multiple continents about his possible involvement with election interference. Plus Cubertruck, that too

/Ok-Entrepreneur-8838 avatar
Ok-Entrepreneur-8838
• I know for a fact that there was a small sect. of the space fan community who always hated him. This is because he's always been the poster boy for the commercialization of space exploration.


Spiel_Foss
• Elon Musk was a clown from the beginning. Now he just believes his own bullshit entirely whereas before he had to play games because he needed other people's money. Now he just steals from the US government, so Elon can act out his true self.


KleptoPirateKitty
• Anyone else remember the time he said if anyone could present a way to end world hunger for $6B he would fund it, and then when he was presented with a way to end world hunger for less than $6B he bought Twitter instead?

FatFish44
• It was literally overnight for me.

His “recommendation” of building a sub in order to rescue the Thai soccer team was probably the stupidest thing I had ever heard in my life.

I wasn’t the only one with that opinion, hence his defensive remarks of calling the true heroes of that rescue “pedophiles.”

He told on himself to the entire world in that moment, and afaik, he had no bad pr before that.


/Dizzy_Tax574 avatar
Dizzy_Tax574
• He was always crazy and kind of shitty. Just less well known for it. From swatting a whistleblower to array of sa allegations etc.

Think the public shifted around thai sub incident. But he was never visionary genius. He mostly runs Trump style scam. Puts his face uses publicity sells garbage cuts corners etc. Then pockets everything.

u/scottiepippen13 avatar
scottiepippen13
• Maybe around the time he hosted SNL, May of 2021


Classic-Session-5551 avatar
Classic-Session-5551
• Snake oil salesman eventually found a new target audience. The old ones were getting wise to the fact he never delivered on promises and everything he touched turned to either shit, or expensive well-invested in but dramatically overpriced mediocrity solely reliant on capital.

XxCorsicoxx
• I think there's still a lot of people who idolize him, but he's definitely no longer seen as this real-life Tony Stark, benevolent billionaire trying to save the world

The signs were always there if you knew to look, but I honestly think for most people the twitter fiasco showcased he is an idiot and for most people his association with Trump showcased he doesn't really care about the environment. Like those were the things that made "normies" lose any respect for him.

But it became apparent earlier that he is a weird insecure edgelord desperately trying to be loved that was too fascism-adjacent earlier than that I'm small ways that the average Joe wouldn't pick up on


u/Just-Context-4703 avatar
Just-Context-4703
• He's only gotten richer but he's always been a racist dumbass


u/Critical_Trash9672 avatar
Critical_Trash9672
• He was always an a-hole. Like the Trumps he was funded by Daddy’s money but tried to play it down. He is a good sales person, I’ll give him that, but otherwise a guy that rides the technical coattails of the real inventors. That’s just scummy.

Salty-Employee
• I’ve always thought he was a chode.

u/FarChange6358 avatar
FarChange6358
• His "downfall" began when he left the democrats party, only then was he the villain. Same happened to Trump, Rogan, musk, RFK and anyone else that doesn't fall in line 1,000%. Sometimes pointing out the obvious is enough to be attacked relentlessly, George Clooney is a perfect example when he said Biden was losing a step and he saw it in person, dude was being crucified and 2 weeks later Biden was pulled from the election. And dont pretend its because he's a billionaire, you are all perfectly fine with Gates, Soros and Oprah.

Feather_Sigil
• Musk has been a rich racist talentless fool his entire life. He's not in a downfall, he's always been a loser with money, but humanity currently worships losers with money. The only noteworthy thing he's ever done in his life is spend money--more money than he's ever deserved, more money than anyone should ever have. You know PayPal? The one thing Musk has that isn't utter garbage? He almost ruined it before it even launched because he wanted it to be his "X.com" single global currency bank idea that he also wanted to do with Twitter

Striker660
• When he opened his mouth to speak

u/Destructodave82 avatar
Destructodave82
• As soon as he was no longer a liberal.

Thats tribalism politics for you.

Needmoresnakes
• Didn't he ban the word "cis"?

u/Zealousideal_Cod5214 avatar
Zealousideal_Cod5214
• Yes, because nothing says free speech like deciding to ban the word "cis" from the site while letting people spout the n word.


u/TankUMrMinor avatar
TankUMrMinor
• No, it started long before Twitter became a shithole

u/lowflier84 avatar
lowflier84
• That was just the icing on the cake. By the time he bought Twitter it was pretty clear that he was a thin-skinned fabulist peddling a BS tale about his "genius".

Imnotcerseilannister
• Yeah it now allows people to compare black people to apes, call us low IQ, and say other disgusting racist things. But ya know, who cares? So long as it’s free speech.

Demonsidekick
• All of the people in third world countries who are no longer being served by USAID would like a word, as well as thousands of federal employees. He’d love to have an opportunity to trash our “entitlements” such as social security (that Americans have paid into their entire working lives), while he collects billions in actual entitlements. He’s also out and proud racist and a transphobe.

Yeah, he’s no villain. He’s just another evil, greedy psychopath.

Bokan
• That guy has always been an asshole. He stole Tesla from its founders and claimed it for his own. That tells you everything.


Netwentyeight
• You grew up and saw beyond the facade.

Rhapsodyingloom
• The hyperloop

EstablishmentLazy553
• Elon and bill gates pr was pretty insane pre covid internet Era but after they started giving unscripted opinions and their actions didn't match notion many people had so many started hating them

perilousLangour
• The first I heard of him was from my little brothers talking about Tesla cars maybe around 2012-14. They bought all the hype. I looked briefly into the guy and the company, and came away deeply unimpressed. There were real, public criticisms and off-putting acts at the time.

I think Musk's purchase of Twitter and then his relationship with Trump's third campaign and second admin are what solidified his negative rep among many today.

Simple_Seaweed_1386
• Elon Musk is a Nazi from South Africa which has a history of white supremacy and he zeig heiled at a Republican convention. Sometime around then?


u/AshleyRoeder33 avatar
AshleyRoeder33
• Conception

seamuncle
• I mean, he’s always been the way he is…are you asking when the public stopped buying into he was something else?

The cave rescue thing was probably the most mainstream, but shitty offhand comments from him go back a lot longer

Popular-Capital-9115
• It has begun? Man stole hundreds of millions of confidential records on the US population in broad daylight and waltzed off. He isn't under any pressure.


u/Crypto-false avatar
Crypto-false
• When he criticised lockdown


diffidentblockhead
• Leaving aside his personal life and goofy statements, here are a couple of bad turns, not the first ones.

The Twitter acquisition pivoted him from building new stuff to dismantling and cost cutting. This naturally led to his role vandalizing the federal government in the early Trump administration. He proved unpopular in electoral politics and had to assume a lower profile.

Earlier, Tesla started as a made-in-America national champion and aligned more with progressives than conservatives. However the Biden administration ignored him in favor of trying to get the legacy Detroit industry started on EVs. This is understandable given that Michigan was a key swing state and that Biden was nominated for his Pennsylvania connection and working-class Rust Belt appeal. Musk complained of neglect and eventually turned right where Thiel was starting to see Trump as weak and open to manipulation. If the administration or even just California had maintained a good relationship with their spawn, some of that might have been avoided.

u/AnalystNecessary4350 avatar
AnalystNecessary4350
• I dont really know much except that he is an oligarch, but he freaking cheats at video games! I cant believe someone with so much money and success has issues with not being the 'best' at everything he does.

u/HelpMe-eMpleH avatar
HelpMe-eMpleH
• When his daughter came out as trans in 2020

agitatedandroid
• Around the time kids started dressing up like an oligarch. Roughly around then.

Thebeardedguy-
• Not downfall. Exposure. He got to close to the sun and suddenly everyone can see his wings for what they are then the sun through him under the buss.

Bugabooandtwo
• As soon as he became famous...so about 2010.

imperfek
• The biggest turning point was in 2020 during pandemic where he got backlash for wanting his workers to work.

The he started down playing the pandemic. Showing up more and more on Joe rogan.

It would have been fine if he wasnt terminally online. He assumed the normal people all hated him but it was just Twitter and reddit. Started claiming the left hates him and decided to make himaelf a political figure.

Probably the worst thing any company figure head can do. As a company you Want to be all inclusive, pretending to call about everyone.

At some point he bought Twitter by leveraging his tesla shares. So he was also under a lot of stress to keep tesla shares high and also make the Twitter acquisitions worth all this.

u/Ochre_jelly1234 avatar
Ochre_jelly1234
• He’s always been a piece of shit

bfeebabes
• When he started to believe his own hype. So about when he was 16. It just took a while to publicly surface his hubris. If he'd have avoided too many drugs and kept his trap a little more...and avoided politics...then maybe things would be different. Still...he's not done bad has he and being an agent provocateur is part of his shtick and no doubt success.

u/Extra_Response6136 avatar
Extra_Response6136
• Whenever his anti union and anti workplace safety actions were first reported... 2014?

u/Okokokok1995 avatar
Okokokok1995
• He's quite the charlatan. Maybe the best the world has ever known. Will probably even become the first trillionaire but it's all built on smoke and mirrors

u/Considered_Dissent avatar
Considered_Dissent
• 2347 during the 2nd War for Mars.


Bfeebabes
• He is Denholm Reynholm. https://i.makeagif.com/media/11-03-2023/DjlN-A.gif


Lakster37
• I don't know if I'd seen it at the time, but looking back, I think one of the first "public" red flags was his appearance on The Big Bang Theory. The main characters meet him volunteering at a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving and he offers to share a piece of pumpkin pie from the trash with one of the series' regulars (I don't remember if it was literally in the trash or if it was just returned uneaten by one of the patrons).

I mean... who would believe that's behavior that ANY billionaire would do, let alone Musk, and what kind of egomaniac would use his appearance on a very popular show for such blatant self-promotion? If you want to show people how selfless you are, go work at an actual soup kitchen - don't pretend to do it in on a TV show... It's pretty disgusting IMO.


Zestyclose_Paint3922
• With Vivian.


u/Maleficent-Win-6520 avatar
Maleficent-Win-6520
• He teamed up with tango man

Luv_Cheat
• Reminder that Elon Musk is a NAZI.

u/manokpsa avatar
manokpsa
• "When I was a child around 2013-2014"

Ouch. Oh my God. Ouch. I plucked a white hair out of my eyebrow today.

u/Needle_Bearings avatar
Needle_Bearings
• I would say what helped him was Iron Man propaganda.  Everyone was calling this a-hole Tony Stark.

BackflipsAway
• Personally I feel like it was when he called a rescue worker a pedophile during that whole thailand cave incident because the rescue worker said that his idea to build a miniature submarine for tunnels that even divers had a hard time fitting through, was dumb.

There were earlier signs, but I feel like before then he might have had a PR team that talked him out of saying anything too stupid too publicly.

u/Chemical-Grade5137 avatar
Chemical-Grade5137
• When he cheated at Diablo IV.

Few_Honey7367
•

For people paying attention he was always a cunt. He didnt invent / pioneer / visionary jack shit

u/Pristine-Lie-3560 avatar
Pristine-Lie-3560
• Tbh I don’t know bc I never trusted him that much

scovizzle
• He's always been like this. You were just a kid and weren't aware of it at the time.

Koolex
• I think the first crack was when he worked with trump in 2016

SteelBox5
• At birth.

u/pyubesalad avatar
pyubesalad
• If you look at his net effect on the world… has he done more harm or good?

Hard to tell.

Seems to me that he’s neither an abomination or an angel and rather a flawed human with a very interesting and profound impact.

Honestly, he could be much worse and much more evil. Maybe surprising the richest man of all time isn’t totally morally corrupt, just partially.

(Personally hard for me to swallow him campaigning for Trump which is my line for no longer being a fan, but if he claimed that was for X specific reason to advance X specific goal I’d believe that he genuinely underestimated how dangerous and cruel Trump is, a lot of folks underestimated his foulness).


u/Hopeful_Mess6142 avatar
Hopeful_Mess6142
• When he teamed up with mango Mussolini The tangerine tyrant. At least that for me was when he went full supervillain and became just another rich asshole. I think if he had largely stayed out of politics or even just tried to not speak his mind so much people would still be relatively pro musk. He talked about doing so many wonderful things with all of that money and he ended up becoming yet another pay pig for the conductor of the Trump train


Robot_boy_07
• I was just like you, I had adults tell me that I shouldn’t obsess over famous rich people and that he was a weirdo. Guess they were right


u/ironedie avatar
ironedie
• The mask fully fell of when he decided to do a double heil Hitler on presidential inauguration, signs were there though for years, people just elected to ignore them.


DeliciousGoose1002
• For me it was way early, he got pranked by another car company and went to the media crying about corporate espionage


Stavkot23
• I don't know much about him but he messed up so badly he got MAGA types to buy his Electric Vehicles

u/Overall_Falcon_8526 avatar
Overall_Falcon_8526
• "Pedo Guy" was when my opinion of him was damaged beyond repair.

Lalcoolj1
• When Grimes dumped him


/Brave_Egg_7984 avatar
Brave_Egg_7984
• It was your report, OP. His wife left, the kids started hating him, then he started channeling hitler at parties just to get some attention......


u/Bear_Teddy avatar
Bear_Teddy
• When he fired his PR team and decided to write in internet by himself.

u/nobody_1298 avatar
nobody_1298
• I think it was when he fired his PR guy whoever it was because no way did this dude keep his public image cleanish that long without a PR guy considering his recent blunders.

Was never really a fan of him, he always had the aura you would normally find around the cheap guy your landlord hires to fix stuff,

But hey he was a net positive even for humanity with cave diving incident. Because you know if he is using his company worth billions to bring some actually good systematic changes to society (instead of "philanthropy") then i couldn't give a rats ass about how many slurs a day he writes on twitter.

Then he brought twitter and the thing about him asking a flight attendant for sex happened, then he became a net neutral for humanity in my book.

Then he went full nazi with the salute, inserted himself into government & turned out he was in epstein files asking epstein for an invitation.

u/dangoblast avatar
dangoblast
• Begin? the cave and divers thing.

The funniest shit I've ever seen? when he got caught paying someone to boost his poe2 account

Pondoon
• Elon Musk had all of his sales and accounting people post sales of cars that were never sold. Tesla sales are one huge book-cooking lie

Cute-Breadfruit3368
• the thai cave, later the heil hitler incident and the fact that he needs to consume copious amounts of drugs to continue existing as himself.

hes a pathetic junkie who want to be surrounded by yesmen. a miserable nobody who has never actually built really anything, but has bought his position in various places so that people would respect him.

he knows that as a poor person he would already have killed himself. with money, hes the only one truly alone in a crowd.

u/ricafa avatar
ricafa
• There was no downfall. He was always an idiot.

u/a_angry_bunny avatar
a_angry_bunny
• I mean, his parents still owned a slave operated emerald mine back then so that should have been a huge red flag.


TheDeltaOne
• For me?

2015: I was kind of curious about this guy. Bought the Ashlee Vance biography that was just out:

They do a great job at carefully choosing their word but it's apparent he's a vapid moron.

Tarmo888
• The first interview on Joe Rogan Experience.

u/CulturistPionier avatar
CulturistPionier
• When he tried to pretend hes good at poe2. that really made a lot of people have a double take on many things he claimed in the past.

Possibly-Functional
• 2013 with the introduction of Hyperloop. It became super clear for anyone with a technical background that the man was a grifter.

u/Salt_Simple_2294 avatar
Salt_Simple_2294
• Elon reminds me of the series "Altered Carbon".

I believe it is in the last season, were the protagonist observes how the rich have 1-on-1 Duells to the death just for the kick, because they are rich enough that their memories are backed up every couple of minutes and if they die, they just transfer their consciousness in a spare body that they synthesized beforehand.

The moral of the story basically is: if you are not afraid of death because you can circumvent it (because you are rich in this case) there are basically no consequences whatsoever for you. Hence, you might as well be ruthless and a narcissist.

I am convinced that his massive wealth has him so far removed from the regular Joe, that a) he forgot how we have to work together for a society to work and b) that he doesn't have to give a shit, because he is too rich to face consequences (.i.e. being an illegal alien of the USA, DOGE, build without permits).

No consequences whatsoever. You can't tell me everybody is the same in front of the law in the US, even before Trump. It is sickening to be honest.

Rosstafarien
• He's not a joke. He's a very dangerous oligarch.


u/ActuatorFit416 avatar
ActuatorFit416
• He already was problematic back then. It was just not as visible to most people

u/mistaekNot avatar
mistaekNot
• guy single handedly dismantled USAID indirectly causing the deaths of hundreds of thousand if not millions. tells you all you need to know about what elon musk is

nibor
• Publicly after his appearance on big bang theory. Privately when he forced out the original owners of Tesla.


•
Tesla Motors was founded in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.

Musk Joined in early 2004. in Feb 2004, he became the largest shareholder and chairman of the board.

For some reason, Sometime between then and 2007 called a founder was super important to Musk. There ended up being a long lawsuit, which was ultimately settled out of court (agreeing that Musk was one of 5 founders).'

Being so hung up on this as to fight it in court, is not normal behavior.

I don't know anything of musk from before that (other than is wealth came from PayPal).


2
Lazy-Cloud9330
•The Thai cave situation. And then it snowballed when he stopped focusing on innovation and space exploration, and became even more arrogant and put politics before human dignity. Power corrupts no matter who they are.

u/Silent_Johnnie avatar
Silent_Johnnie
• I figured he was stupid when he got mad at cave dive rescuers for not using his gigantic sub in a cave with tiny-ass segments and calling them pedo guys for it.

All doubt was removed from my mind that he was stupid around 2020 when he started about Trump and the new Deplorian

u/ThinkSpielberg avatar
ThinkSpielberg
• Personally I’ve been a bit skeptical of him ever since people started saying he was the IRL Tony Stark. I find it a little suspicious when people are hyped up so much. Though I guess his real downfall began around the time he bought Twitter because his management of that started to show the cracks in a way that when he was in charge of DOGE there wasn’t much left to show him as anything more then a guy with money who happened to make a bunch of good purchases and hired some talented engineers that made him look good.

u/ughokayfinee avatar
ughokayfinee
• Idk, personally never liked him. I Remember getting into an argument with one specific friend back in like 2017 over something he did publically, I have since fallen out of touch with that friend but I've wondered from time to time if he ever changed his opinion.

DeathNick
• He was always a douche bag it's just that sometime before the thai cave thing team he fired his PR team. I too was his fan before that. Lesson learned and thanks to series like the boys it opened my eyes to just how much PR management influential people can have

u/mostly_kittens avatar
mostly_kittens
• My first inkling was when Musk got all petulant about Top Gear showing the Tesla Roadster being shit and unreliable. He then sued the BBC and lost. Then did multiple appeals and lost.

u/Distinct-Ad-4464 avatar
Distinct-Ad-4464
•

The story about him firing his personal assistant made him look a bit of a cunt, but can't remember if I heard about that before or after that cave thing.

u/Bracechenko avatar
Bracechenko
• The downfall is in perfect correlation with the reported increases in Ketamine use

u/Ghostmaster145 avatar
Ghostmaster145
• It was around 2020, when Musk demanded his factories re-open in the middle of Covid, was when Reddit began to turn on him


Beginning_Ratio9319
• For me, in 2020 when he refused to obey the stay at home order re the Tesla Fremont plant (this was in March I think, very early in the pandemic). It came into focus that he put himself above the law and all scientific experts. All those people dying at the same time in NYC and that jackass thinks no one should be able to tell him what to do.


Arthur_deve
• When one of his people weew found murdered in the parking lot of the Tesla Fremont Factory and Musk paid to cover it up...and then when his top engineers all died in a (BOSTON BRAKES) plane crash and then when the head of Tesla Investments was murdered by his hookers and then when Gary D. Conley was killed in a field behind an Air Force base..and all of these dead folks had threatened to expose Elon Musk… Just sayin’

u/Fuzzy-Advisor-2183 avatar
Fuzzy-Advisor-2183
• i knew he was a douche when he bought tesla—an already-existing company—and took credit for founding the company. he’s not responsible for the technology, he’s just an opportunistic asshole.


SamuelVimesTrained
• June the 28th, 1971 ..


u/ConsiderationFew8399 avatar
ConsiderationFew8399
• One most people won’t have heard about in regular circles is him streaming “Path of Exile 2”, which he claimed to be one of the best players in the world at, and he clearly had no idea what he was doing and was paying someone to play on his account for him. This was sort of a new level of stupidness, where it’s like “why would you even do any of this”

Similarly he showed off his “Elden Ring” build and it was shockingly bad


u/Transcendentist avatar
Transcendentist
• In 1985, when he bullied some kid about the kid’s dead father so hard. The kid then threw Elon Musk down a flight of stairs so bad he nearly died. I have feelings about what should have happened next.


/AerieWorth4747 avatar
AerieWorth4747
• For me, I always felt like there was probably something off about him and one day I read he carried emeralds around in his pockets in high school. And I instantly went “oh, duh, he comes from wealth” and every thing I read since then made perfect sense about what an out of touch, phony, evil loser he is.

u/gorambrowncoat avatar
gorambrowncoat
•it was the whole twitter thing.

He used to be (or at least seem like) the cool billionaire that was doing rad shit with his money like investing in space flight and stuff. Then the twitter thing happened and he seems more like a billionaire culture warrior. Things have not improved greatly since. I dont know if the twitter thing was the actual turning point but for me it was the big visible marker in any case.

I'm totally ready to forgive if we ditch the politics arc and go back to primarily doing cool space shit though.

KTAXY
• when he split with Grimes. and started naming his kids weird.

u/heydanalee avatar
heydanalee
• Some people knew he was full of crap the whole time. But, that can be said about anyone.

You have to look into anyone that claims to be anything.

u/kristamine14 avatar
kristamine14
• There’s a really good 7 minute long channel 5 video on exactly this topic - https://youtu.be/gAOi7EhmA_8?si=-H2SVLO_x47tDLtC


u/drakonukaris avatar
drakonukaris
• I also used to admire Elon Musk, thought he was supposed to be one of the good guys.

I have heard he fired his PR team but I can't say if that's true or when, it really seems like it though.

It's probably the case that he was a scumbag this entire time but cared enough to project a different image back then.


Kiwifrogg
• Thunderf00t has been telling anyone who will listen that Musk is an idiot since 2016.


u/Respaced avatar
Respaced
• When he became political. He didn’t seem that political before Covid. He came off as reasonable well meaning about saving civilization, climate science etc. There was the cave diver incident… but I never followed that. Just read about it after the facts, and I just thought it was negative media at the time. Because there was so much negative spin coming from the gasoline industry. I’ve never used twitter either so I didn’t see that decline either. For me he was like a force for doing things differently, solving the hard problems. Long term solutions. It gave me hope in a world run with quarter capitalism. I didn’t understand that he was such a narcissist until later. Power corrupts. Him joining the Trump campaign and all the madness after that was the last nail in the coffin.


u/MetaSkeptick avatar
MetaSkeptick
• Elon Musk is a perfect example of ''Power Corrupts'. He used to be a genius little Asperger's boy who liked engineering and thinking about space. Then he got rich and famous and he barely talks about those things anymore, it is just culture war BS and posturing. What a waste.


u/Just-Assumption-2915 avatar
Just-Assumption-2915
• I think it began when one of his children came out as trans.  Clearly if your love is conditional for your children,  you're not a nice person at the end of the day.

Dodavinkelnn
• He did some wild shit but doing heil hitler on TV was the final straw

u/Many-Victory-1825 avatar
Many-Victory-1825
• Yeah, I'd say pretty much say around that time when he was selling people, and the government, snake oil called the Hyper Loop. What's even worse, the guy had a lot of credibility around that time so a lot of people fell for it.

u/Brief-Succotash8280 avatar
Brief-Succotash8280
• When he crashed the McLaren F1

UnlikelyAdventurer
• When he got the gender confirming surgery- the hair plugs and chin implant.

NineTimez
• Everyone's talking about the Thai kids, but Musk's downfall began in his childhood home where he was catered to by black servants who worked under apartheid. No good can come from an upbringing of racist entitlement like his.

u/Material-Orange3233 avatar
Material-Orange3233
• When he became a trillionaire he couldn’t hide his real self

u/Consistent-Air-2152 avatar
Consistent-Air-2152
• It was when he joined doge and wanted to fire everyone

jeophys152
• Elon has always been a shitty person. His parents are jackasses and he was raised to be one too. He has just been very good at his own personal branding. It has always surprised me how many people couldn’t see it when he first started gaining notoriety


julias_siezure
• I knew someone who worked at spaceX in the 2010-2013 (before the Thai cave event) and they would brush me off whenever I asked about Elon personally.

Enjoytherest
• The podcast "If Books Could Kill" did a 2 partner on his rise in popularity and then fall into far right grifting - highly recommend!


Cleo0424
• Probably a few things but I started taking him less seriously when his affair with Amber Heard came out.

u/krackadile avatar
krackadile
• Seems like it was when he got into politics and started trying to help cut the budget and people weren't happy about it.

u/Ichifanni250 avatar
Ichifanni250
• I noticed the change after the lawsuits, of which there’s many, for Tesla started kicking in and at first he was trying to stick up for Tesla’s but you could see him change around 2017-2018. Put more weight on and looked a bit spaced out and not giving a fuck.

u/The-zKR0N0S avatar
The-zKR0N0S
• I don’t think you can describe him in a downfall.

He was already knowingly lying to investors in the 2013-2014 timeframe though.

Eokokok
• 2013 is already beginning of the Hyperloop bullshittery so his stupidity and/or hype pumping stock schemes were becoming really clear all the way back then...

Historical_Project86
• He's been a questionable employer for as long as I can remember.

u/Beautiful_Film2563 avatar
Beautiful_Film2563
• the glazers were really suspect, especially when it turns out they were paid off and ex-employees couldnt give honest feedback about working at TESLA. also bullshit like the HYPERLOOP and all sorts of nonsense came out over the years that outed him as conman.

u/SnapDragon2525 avatar
SnapDragon2525
• Back then I liked hearing about Space X, he was odd, a bit weird even. As others have said his comments about the Thai rescuer started his downfall then we heard more and more about his racism and hatred.

Ramoncin
• The moment he opened his mouth.

u/Reasonable-Coconut15 avatar
Reasonable-Coconut15
• The dude has always creeped me out, and a friend, years ago, said he reminded him of a young Obediah Stane.  But I just figured he was eccentric and intelligent, so I didnt pay him any mind. I knew a few of the things he had done, and had heard talk about how he didnt actually invent or design anything, he just bought companies and pretended they were his ideas.  Again, didnt care and moved on with my life.

But then I heard about the guy who made him a mug of a farting unicorn, which musk then took and adopted as his favorite picture and used it for tesla features.  Didn't give the guy any money for it, just "exposure". He had to settle with the guy after he was sued. Just rubbed me the wrong way, and I've hated him ever since.


all_time_high
• Potentially COVID when he had to keep his factories closed down, so he got pissed at California and moved to Texas. He kept his anger going and directed it as democrats and liberals, which was an unexpected heel turn to many.

That seemed to be when the mask just fell off entirely.

The mask was definitely slipping when he called the rescue diver a pedo with no apparent justification.

u/redfield79_ avatar
redfield79_
• See now, i saw through all this at the jump. I've got friends who just adore him and I've always rolled my eyes hard. It's terrifying guys like him have as much money as he does.


Realistic_Let3239
• Twitter was what broke it, Musk threw aside the mask, the carefully maintained personal persona was gone, that was when it all came tumbling down for him. There was many signs before then, but Twitter was where he threw aside his marketing team and bought into his own hype enough that he thought he could do without the PR.

The Thai cave incident was the first slip up, Twitter was where he discarded the mack generally. Then he did the bad guy salute a couple of years back... So he downfall started like 8 or 9 years ago, but he's got enough money he just keeps falling upwards, despite his collapsing popularity.

TheMatt561
• For me it was the Model 3, I bought into all the puffery on the goal that it was all leading to the model 3 to be a mass produced sub 30k car for the masses. When that fell to the wayside I never believed anything he said again.

Echoota
• I decided to never Tesla around 2018, he had a trail WTFs leading up to that.


u/TheKipperRipper avatar
TheKipperRipper
• Waaaay back when he first started talking about AI and his own engineers had to correct him after pretty much any public appearance. I had studied aspects of AI in university and picked up on a few of the more obvious blunders he made. Then it somehow seemed like he knew less about the subject the more he opened his mouth.


Cloudsmiles
• When he was born.


u/MiserableYou6506 avatar
MiserableYou6506
• He's DARPA plant from begining

u/LackOptimal553 avatar
LackOptimal553
• When he was born. He was piece of shit when he took his first breath. Bred from pieces of shit.


u/Klaphek avatar
Klaphek
• Since his birth



u/crewsctrl avatar
crewsctrl
• When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

You grew up and became an adult. Elon never did.

u/globefish23 avatar
globefish23
• June 2018 during the Tham Luang cave rescue.

Elon Musk very stupidly suggested to use one of his minisubs to rescue the kids from the flooded cave, which a world-renowned cave diver, working in the rescue, dismissed.

Elon then publicly called the cave diver a pedophile.


u/DramaticTry2113 avatar
DramaticTry2113
• When his kid told the president to shut the f up

u/BrangdonJ avatar
BrangdonJ
• Not until the early 2020s. He'd always been a bit of a dick, but that's when he went off the rails. The rejection by his (trans) daughter probably contributed. It's when he got into COVID denial and bought Twitter. It's when he started interfering in American politics. It's my belief that he self-radicalised during that time, around 2021 - 2022.

A lot of early incidents are mis-remembered. He never called a rescue diver a pedo, for example. He used that slur against a guy who knew the rescue divers. That guy was not a diver himself, was not a hero, but had the phone number of some people who were. Musk had been in contact with the people leading the rescue, and they wanted the capsule his team was working on. It was built to fit their specifications. At that point, he was still mostly a good guy trying to provide help when requested. He used a bad word, it's true, but like I said, he'd always been a bit of a dick.


Popular-Drummer-7989
• When he overstayed his student visa



/GusBode avatar
GusBode
• There is a “Behind the Bastards “ podcast who researches his past and lays it all out. Fascinating deep dive expose.


Clovenstone-Blue
• Elon's public downfall started around the cave incident in Thailand, beginning the unravel of the PR crafted tech genius he pretended to be. Buying Twitter and immediately burning it to the ground, the Cybertruck, and dropping the mask fully as he went far right just secured that public downfall.



Malfordcat
• way earlier than this, but when he started pretending he was a pro gamer… like why lol


ToWanderHer
• He was never cool. You were just a child. It's not your fault.

u/yick04 avatar
yick04
• Zombie flamethrower.

Eastcoastme
• I teach third grade. Kids do biography presentations on him all the time. Ugh.

u/Dakota1228 avatar
Dakota1228
• For the sake of being “that person” I never liked the guy bc there was always something off/artificial/superficially contrived about him and I could never put a name to it.

When he went full red pill, it didn’t matter to me anymore why I originally felt that way.


Master-Back-2899
• For me it was when I read his biography book. This was a book that was approved by him that was supposed to show how great he was but he came across as a psychopath. Then a few years after that was cave incident which I think was the turning point for the rest of the world.

It’s too bad, my friends and I used to dream of getting a Tesla and being part of the future of humanity. Now I’m just sad.


u/RL203 avatar
RL203
•Im a car guy. Ive never like electric cars because they are high maintenence just to drive. And Tesla? Built like shit and I don't want a boring looking car that sounds like a fork lift. But I digress

As far as it goes, you can't deny Musk is a pioneer. I thought when Tesla became a thing that the big boys would either buy him out or destroy him. Neither has happened. So he knows what he is doing. His foray into government disappointed me because I thought he should be focusing all his time and energy on Tesla and not doing the dirty work in government for Trump. You look at Steve Jobs and he was always lazer focused on Apple. Musk lost his focus. So although I dont think he's finished by a longshot, him getting on his knees before Trump was a very stupid move on his part.


u/AnalogyAddict avatar
AnalogyAddict
• He was always like that. He just got rich enough to let his real self out so that everyone could see it.


u/Viscount_Barse avatar
Viscount_Barse
• When a Streamer (possibly everyday astronaut) asked why he didn't use a particular type of rocket motor that would be better and he awkwardly moved on. Then the next version used that suggested motor.

Also everything about the cybertruck is absolutely Homers stupid car from the Simpsons.


Uncle-Cake
• The day he was conceived.

Kellykeli
• Around the time he announced hyperloop.

u/ExtentAggravating733 avatar
ExtentAggravating733
• He has more or less been lying every single year since 2010 about Tesla's expected production numbers, sales, and technologies.

I would say it's a miracle Tesla succeeded after failing its targets so many years in a row, but it was these lies that kept (and keep) investors from withdrawing from Tesla. Even now, most investors are convinced that Tesla is going to be selling humanoid robot workers within the next 3 years.

u/zinniawormwood123 avatar
zinniawormwood123
• I think around the time he started dating Grimes. At least that is when I started realizing.

u/BrokenHero287 avatar
BrokenHero287
• His downfall was growing up in South Africa and thinking Apartheid was good and never should have ended.

BigShiddur
• I mean as soon as people started to realize his white papers were shit, and his products were shit, and he was shit.... You get the picture- it just evolves naturally.

u/Academic-Edge avatar
Academic-Edge
• I wasn't aware of the cave diving incident since I was a little baby bitch boy, but I discovered him around the time that template reddit memes where popular around 2018-2019.

Id say the final nail in the coffin for him in the general public was either his appearance on SNL cosplalying as Wario, or him buying twitter.

Off topic, but that video where he and Justin Roiland reviewed memes aged like the dried ulcer of a dead cow.

Crani0
• Around the time he fired his whole PR team which was not long after the Thai Cave incident.

Not_Too_Busy
• Twitter was his downfall. Even before he bought the company, Twitter gave him a place to compulsively publish his weirdo views on everything, and people realized how despicable he was. If he had stayed off social media, he might still be admired.

Bob_luie

• Negros were Elon Musk’s downfall. He HATES THEM with all of his soul!!!

FatSmoothie
•

When he fired his PR team in 2017, notice how all the scandalous stories came out afterwards

u/MiguelIstNeugierig avatar
MiguelIstNeugierig
• It was always there, people simply chose not to look and took his PR stunts at face value.

The "I consoomed his products before he turned evil" trend that went on last year was an ironic and depressing tell of how people dont care about the injustices and suffering these people inflict as long as its under a snug rug, somewhere you cant see.

u/20_BuysManyPeanuts avatar
20_BuysManyPeanuts
• when he started to take notice of people on the internet thinking he was Tony Stark.

Braillenotincluded
• He has always been problematic rich kid buying other people's companies and making it appear he was the founder. He got more and more full of himself with the success that those companies had and the more power he could accrue.

Osiris_Raphious
• There was a time his wealth afforded him a slice of controlling the narrative, but the truth couldnt be MSM corporate media washed..


u/thesixgun avatar
thesixgun
• First time he was on Rogan

u/Fabulous_Analysis885 avatar
Fabulous_Analysis885
• For me it was when he launched a Tesla into space as a PR stunt. It had no scientific value and was basically akin to littering. I thought it was very egotistical. Also what if that thing collides with a space-faring ship, ours or otherwise, in a million years from now. Thanks Elon.



u/WhatANoob2025 avatar
WhatANoob2025
• You dressed up as and did a report on him when you were a child not because he was even an ounce less bad than he is right now, but because you were a stupid, easily impressable child who didn't know squat.

Elon has always been a rich kid douchebag exploiting & looking down on common people and talking shit.

u/howvicious avatar
howvicious
• When he bought Twitter.

Quailking2003
• I think his buyout of twitter in 2022 was the final straw for many

u/hof_1991 avatar
hof_1991
• When he was born with more money than he could reasonably spend into a family of not-see sympathizers. His brain was cooked early on. Then no one said no to him for decades.

Vivaphx
• There’s a few things that upset me in his personal life that I don’t care for, but the thing that made me say hey that’s weird… was when he was building the Super Loop in Las Vegas underground and it was going to be this Giant People Mover from the airport to the strip and then it just turned out to be a small tunnel with a few Model 3’s underground that could move like 2 people at a time at 15 mph and they had drivers. Way over promised and under delivered.


u/Repulsive-Audience-8 avatar
Repulsive-Audience-8
• Thai cave rescues. He offered some submersible tech he had, they declined, he got pissy about the rejection and valued the literal hero of the safe a PDF.

Arijan101
• I'd say it started arround 2022, right after the pandemic, with the Thailand cave incident, continued with Twitter and it was all downhill from there.

The only reason why Musk isn't completely broke, in debt and up to his eyeballs in lawsuits is Donald Trump.

u/olinerd avatar
olinerd
• In the early days of Tesla I thought he was super cool. He made EVs cool to Americans and honestly, that’s not nothing. In 2016 I was ready to put a deposit down on a Model 3 (couldn’t convince my husband to do it).

But I’m a roboticist and around that same time I could see where the self driving car industry was going (aka nowhere near what he kept hyping up), and he was claiming he’d 100% automate his manufacturing operations when I knew robots weren’t capable enough to do that for about eighty different reasons. So definitely one of those experiences of “he started talking about the thing I’m an expert in and that made it obvious he doesn’t actually know shit.” And it was all downhill for me the from there with the cave thing proving that he is, in fact, ignorant as shit and completely unaware of it.

Hamiguamvh
• There is a great Search Engine podcast on this very topic. Totally fascinating and explains how the negative attention social media gives some people has landed us in the mess we’re in today.

Also, Search Engine is an amazing podcast if you’ve never heard of it,  https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/search-engine/id1614253637?i=1000621870984

jdemack
• Downfall? I never had him on a pedestal anyway. Fucking Reddit couldn't help but slobber on his knob back in the day. The hate is only extreme on here because of the early days of knob slobbering and his actions since. LESSON: DON'T PUT PEOPLE ON PEDESTALS.


u/Melicor avatar
Melicor
• Depends, if you worked in an industry he claimed to be an expert in (like software development or engineering) you picked up on him being a con artist a long time ago.


spook_filled_donuts
• As a person, probably early on. Politically? When he helped rig the election in favor of Trump, Trump turned on him, he turned on Trump, and he couldn’t come out and say he rigged the election or he’d be in trouble. So he had to eat it. Fell off since.

AutVincere72
• Always knew he was a tool from the beginning. People who liked the things he liked, liked him. They didn't know him at aĺl. Tesla QC and employee treatment was a big red flag. The tents?



BlackestHerring
• When he went from having fuck you money, to fuck me money. He has so much money he just does shit that gets him into trouble.


u/Ill_Significance5839 avatar
Ill_Significance5839
• Divorce


u/bluemooncommenter avatar
bluemooncommenter
• I don't remember what year it was (less than 15 yrs ago/ more than 10) I thought the work Tesla was doing was fantastic and they were developing roof solar panels that look like regular roof shingles/tiles and I thought that was a brilliant idea so I started looking into what jobs were open. During that I read enough about how awful it was to work there that it started to change my opinion. Then the Thailand thing happened...was downhill from there.


u/ChinookNL avatar
ChinookNL
• For me the purchase of Twitter and the rebrand of it


u/mmalcolm86 avatar
mmalcolm86
• When he created Doge. Cut budgets/jobs, inserted his own companies, stole billions from Americans then literally close up shop and walk away..well with the help of his crook billionaire friend aka the president.

u/Craiglekinz avatar
Craiglekinz
• I fully lost trust in Elon when he paid a guy to play path of exile on his twitter stream. Literally braindead scummy behavior with no upside. It’s a sad action only meant to please his ego and live a lie. I fundamentally cannot trust people who think this way.

BeenDragonn
• They first time I saw a cybertruck I knew Elon lost it. Surrounded himself with YES men.

u/Fabulous-Rain7914 avatar
Fabulous-Rain7914
•

When he did Rogan

u/Xul418 avatar
Xul418
• He was always a lying scumbag con-artist, media just went for the hype story and too many people believed it. As a child of course you really couldn't know that ...

People could have known when he was proposing that idiot hyperloop nonsense (which was around 2013-14). But most modern journalists are just clickbait bitches instead of actual journalists.

Hannibaltarantino
• The cave diving incident was the point of no return but to me the thing that truly denoted him as evil in my book was when he offered to pay to solve world hunger if someone were to present him with a viable plan, credible non-profits did exactly that, and he took that money and bought Twitter instead in order to influence an election.

Bolt_995
• A year or two before his Thai cave rescue online spat.

AlexStar6
• In 2009 when the actual founders of Tesla sued him for libel and slander because he was saying he was a founder of the company…

He wasn’t.

Knew then that he had followed in his slave owning families footsteps of being a complete trash human being

u/TheIrradiant avatar
TheIrradiant
• When he started chasing the camera guy with the flamethrower, and the Thai cave rescue.

u/Specific_Frame8537 avatar
Specific_Frame8537
• The moment he started speaking.


Boodyclap
• Somehow I can place it at the flame thrower video, I think it was after Tesla launched a car into space and people just kinda collectively went "wait this guy's kinda weird" and then from there it got more and more cringe


u/ifloops avatar
ifloops
• The Thai rescue thing was certainly weird and stupid, but for me, it doesn't hold a candle to buying Twitter and renaming it X. He was full looney tunes by that point.


u/Beefy-McQueefy avatar
Beefy-McQueefy
• Elon is a baby raper who went to Epstein island


RobIsInTheSky
• he fired his old pr team which apparently did a grest job because I legit thought guy is one of the rare good ones. The hyperloop bs was the first thing that I noticed that broke the narrative (was studying traffic engineering at the tine) and I've seen what a massive moron he is lol


u/LazyDynamite avatar
LazyDynamite
• For those of us that always saw through him for the guy he was, when he started to become popular. So yeah, 2012-2013ish timeframe sounds about right for me.


u/Lowe0 avatar
Lowe0
• Elon’s talent is being a hype man. So his value to society has always been inseparable from the thing he’s hyping. Electric cars? Practical. Rockets? Cool. Ethno-nationalism? Nope.

u/CardOk755 avatar
CardOk755
• When he fired his PR team who had been hiding his real nature.


IkmoIkmo
• When did he turn insane? Well he didn't get rich just by being brilliant, lots of people are. He seems to have had an insane childhood, his father is crazy and has 2 children with Elon's sister who in a way is his stepmom (yes, really). He's started using drugs at some point. We're talking about a guy who sleeps 4 hours a day, is on drugs, weird childhood, can buy anything he wants, talks to country presidents. He was already weird as fuck around that time, the Thai cave thing was hella weird. And then Covid hit while Tesla was at a very vulnerable time, I think he saw it as an existential issue and essentially 'picked a side' which was anti-establishment, anti-left, because the stereotypical view of the left and right is that they see government as a tool to protect the weak and to control the strong, the left see this as a mostly good thing, the right see it as a mostly bad thing. So Covid pushed him over the edge. At some point when you pick a side it's hard to go back, business became extremely politicised. Then his daughter turned trans. I think his brain just exploded lol.

Gnarkill0666
• When people started calling him a genius and he believed it when he has never invented a single thing

u/patdashuri avatar
patdashuri
• Downfall? What downfall? He just openly purchased a presidential election, threw a seig heil to the fucking American flag at that presidents acceptance ceremony, secured a trillion dollar paycheck from a company the taxpayers subsidize, went into the back rooms of the government and removed all his competition (business and citizen) and now has birthright citizenship on the ropes which, when defeated, he will then argue that means the requirement that a president be a natural born citizen is now invalid and then he will buy a second presidency for himself. He will have already bought all of Congress and scotus by then.

u/Sea-Weakness-5272 avatar
Sea-Weakness-5272
• always been bad

u/Televators avatar
Televators
• He's been a douchebag and a clown since the beginning. I remember reading interviews with him back in 2010/11 and thinking he was full of shit.


Directrix688
• For me it was 2014 when Tesla did the battery swap tax scam on California.

Polygeekism
• I think one of the other things PR couldn't control is when people started learning his view on kids and repopulation and how it's a very very white supremacist movement. Having 14 kids with 4 different women, that we know about, all with overlapping ages while clearly never being around any of them is a pretty shitty thing for any person to do.

1. Susan_powder2
   • When all of the global media exposed every member of his family as manipulative sociopaths
   
   Hiram_Hackenbacker
   • When Tesla sued Clarkson for a mildly bad review.
   
   u/Emperor_NOPEolean avatar
   Emperor_NOPEolean
   • Covid, and when he took over Twitter, seem to be the point IMO.
   
   He got a platform where he was utterly unregulated and could voice his views to a wide audience
   
   He went, in the eyes of the public, from Tony Stark Lex Luthor, all because he couldn’t shut up on the internet, and because people had more time to pay attention.
   
   
   u/kpeds45 avatar
   kpeds45
   • I'd say his Hyperloop white paper trying to stop a transit plan. You had a lot of engineers tear it to shreds and for a lot of people online who didn't follow him much, it was interesting to see that he was basically a charlatan. Then the caves and calling an actual hero a pedo.
   
   
   
   Mouth_Herpes
   • He bought Twitter and let Republicans use it. At that point, he became an unperson.
   
   
   AggravatedMango
   • I have come to believe that his only supporters are bots online and the yes men he surrounds himself with.
   
   
   u/BrilliantWhile2413 avatar
   BrilliantWhile2413
   • I did this big project on AI back in like 2012 and a lot of it was quotes from Elon about how ai is going to ruin the world and we need to make sure that we don't develop it. Anyway here we are now.
   
   For me it was the Thai cave thing and smoking a spliff on Rogan. I personally don't care about him smoking a spliff but that really started him on a war path bc the Tesla stock tanked. After that he would manipulate the stock market with tweets whenever he needed cash.
   u/kim_jong_il_2d avatar
   kim_jong_il_2d
   • It is still a test of ideological purity on the right that they have to worship Elon.
   
   I'd say in 2013 with the hyper loop project.
   
   No way an inclosed tube would work with the amount of air that needs to be moved. Would just make it incredibly inefficient.
   
   u/Practical_Law6804 avatar
   Practical_Law6804
   • I'm sure it was before, but I think the purchase of Twitter was the beginning of the end for his image that no amount of "cool PR" could overcome.
   
   
   u/Proud_Smell_4455 avatar
   Proud_Smell_4455
   • I never liked him from the first time I saw a photo of him. He just has the smug, ferret-y facial expressions of some privileged rich kid who doesn't know shit and can't be trusted half as far as they can be thrown.
   
   
   u/Guini_pig42 avatar
   Guini_pig42
   • Super heartening seeing a bunch of people admit that they were clapping like seals when the rabidly anti union south African emerald mine billionaire heir hellbent on privatizing essential services was embezzling public funds to shoot cars into space and build the world's stupidest subway. But then he acted weird.
   
   I hope people take this as an opportunity for reflection, but when the next Elon comes along they'll do the same thing and by the time public opinion shifts it will again be too late.
   
   
   u/CommercialFloor2033 avatar
   CommercialFloor2033
   • His kid being trans was his main villain moment - he went far right from this point and funded far right organisations.
   
   
   0Rbital-nugget
   • When it all started going to his head
   Haelborne
   • His union busting was the start of it for me. The point of no return was his covid response, and after that he just started ticking off racist, sexist and egotistical tropes daily.
   
   u/ClassroomFit7065 avatar
   ClassroomFit7065
   • Not sure, but I remember writing a little "article + questions" thing for a tutoring company re: his Hyperloop idea and thinking "wow, this is destined to be either vaporware or an irrelevant, pointlessly expensive competitor for MagLev." I believe that was... 2015, maybe? (I think the impetus was the student pod design competition, which happened around then.) In any event, I definitely clocked him as some self-proclaimed genius trying to fill the post-Jobs "tech messiah" vacuum.
   
   All of that said: yeah, the Thai cave thing was the first real chink in his armor. In the hipster realm, his alliance with Grimes - which started in 2018 - also didn't bode well for either of their reputations.
   
   
   u/danekan avatar
   danekan
   • As a former Tesla owner I’d say he started making irrational decisions around 2020 when he disabled the sonar and radar sensors in the vehicles (and removed entirely from new builds) in favor of only using cameras for autonomous driving in order to save money. And now we have waymo all over but rarely hear of Tesla taxi
   
   TrippyTigre
   • Tl;dr: He's a rich entrepreneur from S.Africa that knows how to invest and exploit government initiativs, he's not a genius and he's genuinely a bad person and people are realizing it now that he's center stage.
   
   Literal downfall? He's still raising, richest man on the Earth and continuing. Publicly? Probably around the time he purchased twitter and aligned himself with the alt-right + Trump. Personally, I always hated him after I first looked into his history. He's not a genius or a self-made man, he comes from exorbitant wealth, got into Paypal using his money, but claims credit for 1/2 the work. Then pumped money into Tesla and funded already passionate engineers to make a product and profit, also propped up by government initiatives. I'll give him some props for SpaceX too, but at the end of the day, these are all self-serving goals and also exploits he has been using to not pay taxes. I will now take away his credit for SpaceX for being seen as a NASA alternative and cutting funding to space-faring programs.
   
   
   /Cave_Bear_Cult avatar
   Cave_Bear_Cult
   • When he appeared in Iron Man 2. That was the first time I became aware of who he was, and since he's always been a shithead there was always a ticking clock on his popularity. The more information people had about him, the more people realized what a twat he is.
   
   
   TrueRedditMartyr
   • The answer was when he was accused of sexual harassment (or right before). Until then, a lot of people liked him. Then he suddenly posted "Im a Republican now. Now watch the Democrats try to demonize me!" and the next day the accusations came out. Since then hes just been trying to continue hiding all his issues by trying to force himself into a group that will accept him
   
   Sumon_irv
   • When he told the stewardess on his private jet that he would give her a pony if she gave him a blow job and when he filled all these delusional girls up with his sperm because he promised them he would give them super babies… Poor Elon, NDA’s do not work any longer..HA!
   
   Ok-Personality-27
   • Pretty sure Elon had a pr team in the beginning. At some point he thought; I don't need these people..
   
   That was probably a bad decision. Went from hero to zero real fast.
   
   u/_mid_life-crisis avatar
   _mid_life-crisis
   • I think Grimes broke up with him, then he started smoking weed with Joe Rogan, and failing to save kids from a cave
   
   u/NegativeSemicolon avatar
   NegativeSemicolon
   • After the model 3 ramp up pains, he was there yelling at everyone to go faster 24/7 and something must have broken inside. He was a weird guy before then too though.
   
   
   u/PandaXXL avatar
   PandaXXL
   • This question is asked so often and the answer is always so unanimous that I’m not sure how anyone could be left with any doubt at this point.
   
   “Downfall” is not really accurate either. He’s simultaneously ruined and boosted his public image depending on which side of the political spectrum you speak with and he’s gotten significantly richer and more powerful over that time period too.
   
   u/Nonzerob avatar
   Nonzerob
   • I think the PewDiePie Meme Review he did with Justin Roiland set him up to be terminally online. He seemed new to internet humor and has been obsessed with "let that sink in" type jokes since
   
   • He was always a little off, but his erratic behavior and delusions of grandeur have progressed quite a bit and it appears that he may be suffering from the effects of prolonged drug abuse (ketamine, possibly mixed with other drugs). When he started getting involved in white nationalist politics and spouting conspiracy theories, he quickly got tagged as a crank and never recovered. He's now widely regarded as an overpaid insufferable idiot that's a crappy CEO.
   
   
   GoodVibes737
   • Honestly probably this last election cycle and politics in general. He more or less aligned himself against his fan base.
   
   Now most of his fan base belongs to another person and he burned the bridge with people who liked him naturally.
   
   
   Barelylegola5
   • I remember I didn't think much of him other than some rich guy. Then I saw him on Rogan and he just came off as a complete weirdo. So I never thought of him as a "tech bro cool guy".
   
   
   Eazypeazy303
   • His downfall began when his daddy just GAVE him everything he has instead of making him earn it. He's a spoiled brat and it shows in every aspect of his life.
   
   u_r_succulent
   • Musk had a publicist who was really good at her job. She was doing a lot of work for him, so she asked him for a raise. He told her to take a 2 week vacation while he considered it and, when she got back, she fired her because he figured he didn’t need her anymore based on those two weeks. His image has gone to shit since then.
   
   u/Ok-Plane5979 avatar
   Ok-Plane5979
   • Good question. Saw him as a somewhat of savior with his push for electric cars and exciting reusable spacevehicles. Now I have nothing but contemt for the man. Just embarrasing to have idolised that piece of shit, but atleast it's a good lesson learned.
   
   u/Wojwo avatar
   Wojwo
   • I think it was Musks affair with Sergey Brins wife. After that, it seems, Musk was excluded from a lot of elite circles and had to start hanging out with other social circles with different political and social norms.
   
   
   
   West-Tap7924
   • When he started digging into all the government corruption is when the hive mind attacked
   
   
   
   u/JawtisticShark avatar
   JawtisticShark
   • The cave diver thing was the first big spectacle, but I was working in automotive during early days of Tesla and his constant claims of full self driving being right around the corner and the existing cars will software update to do it as well came off as snake oil salesman very clearly, but so many people wanted to believe.
   
   It made no sense. If true full self driving was nearly there, there would be so much more money in focusing on highway driving for trucks and then using truckers to handle the last mile logistics. Trucking companies would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars extra dot trucks that could run 24/7 because the driver just lived in the cab and works a few hours per day doing last mile work.
   
   
   u/Lost-Blueberry8057 avatar
   Lost-Blueberry8057
   • Outwardly/culturally it was the moment he smooched that J on Rogan
   
   
   u/Forikorder avatar
   Forikorder
   • he used to have a PR team that controlled his public image, but they did it so well he didnt think he needed one because he was so awesome so he fired it and everything went downhill from there
   
   
   Maluton
   • For me it was seeing how he used X to manipulated the crypto market during the 2020 run. It was disgusting, obvious, and somehow legal.
   
   u/Desperate_Object_677 avatar
   Desperate_Object_677
   • he was always a joke, but media love to fluff a billionaire. back when you were a child it was clear to adults paying attention that he was playing shell games with his money to defraud investors and the government. also that he was lying about his tech.
   
   he is worth more now than ever, what with the regulatory capture of the american government. (i’m not sure what else to call it when you buy a politician so that they will fire everyone responsible for investigating the contracts you have signed with their government)
   
   u/Capable-Goat-6550 avatar
   Capable-Goat-6550
   • Right around when he started "micro dosing" ketamine
   
   WnDelPiano
   • Apparently most of his good publicity came from a specific PR agent who was fired for asking a raise but my source is reddit so take it with a grain of salt.
   
   u/Ok_Drama8139 avatar
   Ok_Drama8139
   • Seems to line up with his relationship with Grimes. She's big into heavy and hard drugs, probably picked up the habit from her. It's been downhill since then.
   
   u/Lemons-95 avatar
   Lemons-95
   • It started with a flamethrower, and then the Joe Rogan Experience happened and he started getting positive attention for being a bit of a wanker. He is the human embodiment of having a wank, so he took to this and let his freak flag fly. Before that he was careful i guess? Or maybe everything changed him a lot as a person? But yeah he got us all man, he was gonna save the enviroment, make the internet free worldwide(🤣), he said and did a lot of good things for a while, honestly people he didn't get were probably judgemental assholes who just got a "broken clock, twice a day" here.
   
   u/Nearby_Skin_4962 avatar
   Nearby_Skin_4962
   • For me his interview with Joe Rogan revealed him a total moron. And I think it really made him into a public edgelord he is now.
   
   PrudentLingonberry21
   • When most people were still praising him as a genius, he shot that car into space and someone tweeted “what if Elon Musk ends up being Lex Luthor instead of Superman” and I thought yep that tracks
   
   
   /fingersonlips avatar
   fingersonlips
   • I mean, for me it was when he clearly paid for a guest role in Iron Man 2.
   
   That’s fucking loser behavior.
   
   
   /dyslexicwizard avatar
   dyslexicwizard
   • When he proposed hyperloop as a good idea.
   
   
   u/Appropriate-Bet3576 avatar
   Appropriate-Bet3576
   • I think as a culture we've moved passed him. For a long time we thought he was some kind of prophet. But then we got surrounded by many such rich college-dropouts-turned-businesspeople and we as a culture learned they are just regular people with a big microphone and in general causing more harm than benefit.
   
   
   /dankutare1 avatar
   dankutare1
   • He started talking more often publicly, killed the illusion that he was intelligent
   
   
   /eyes_on_everything_ avatar
   eyes_on_everything_
   • He has always been in downfall, but had an amazing PR team. He got too powerful and confident, believing the lies his PR team fed to us every day. He fired said team because he decided he was too cool and didn’t need help. And we could see the real him, that horrible self entered pathetic manchild whose only “virtue” was having money.
   
   THSiGMARotMG
   • Him buying twitter was when it really got worse. His views on covid in the beginning were bad too. He was “le cool” when he smoked weed on JRE, but I cant seem to remember when the tides shifted. Twitter for me
   
   VIP_NAIL_SPA
   • When he started speaking
   
   UrbanNorminal
   • When he only cared about Tesla and SpaceX and not politics. He just did not show the public how big of an overachieving smart asshole he is. He is not a genius, but he does know how to use people around him and make money. He embodies the worst of humanity.
   
   u/-Altephor- avatar
   -Altephor-
   • Elon Musk has always been a fucking pathetic joke. He used to be a fucking pathetic joke with a good PR team.
   
   
   u/FangornLeghorn avatar
   FangornLeghorn
   • When his kid came out as trans and he lost his damn mind it made it pretty clear that he’s a massive piece of toxic shit.
   
   
   Ma5ochrist
   • This quote specifically for me "if WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it" and then he did nothing at all
   
   
   u/weed_cutter avatar
   weed_cutter
   • I always knew Elon was an autistic "never invented one thing" fraudster moron from Day 1.
   
   Reddit "Le Bazinga" largely loved him all the way until he hopped onto the Trump train.
   
   ... My main annoyance with him was ... he fancied himself Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs ... but he started a millionaire Richie Rich and again --- never invented ONE thing.
   
   He bought into PayPal midstream. He may have 'founded' SpaceX but he personally didn't invent anything. He's just an annoying businessman, who Reddit believes is some kind of super genius.
   
   
   u/One-Earth9294 avatar
   One-Earth9294
   • Well I've never liked the guy because I always thought his stance on how he deserves all of NASA's funding is some bullshit. He's always wanted to privatize space and that's something I've always felt strongly against.
   
   So pretty much back when he was selling flamethrowers and I first heard about him. I pity that so many people couldn't see through him at first glance.
   
   
   u/Living_in_the_dumps avatar
   Living_in_the_dumps
   • if anyone actually bothered to listen to the words he says or has said then Day 1. dood is a legit mentally challenged loony nazi.. and always has been..
   
   
   u/RightsForRobots avatar
   RightsForRobots
   • Lots of people will cite the cave diving incident, but for me it was even ealrier. He started taking pot shots at the press... all while having James Murdoch (son of News Corp/Fox News owner Rupert) on the Tesla board.
   
   
   u/0815facts_fun_ avatar
   0815facts_fun_
   • The fall happened in corona time when the government wanted to shut down the Factory in LA because of the high infection rate.
   
   
   Designer_Can_6551 avatar
   Designer_Can_6551
   • Around the time he bough Tesla honestly. He publicly became a lepper after buying twitter but he thinks he invented and built the tesla, he bought into a company that was on target (Tesla) to be profitable and fucked it up royally but the momentum carried his wealth into Space X and Starlink, now hes too big to stop.
   
   
   AManHere
   • Covid happened and democrats started to make policies against his businesses, like Tesla factories couldn’t re-open due to lock down. That’s when Elon started to step away from being liberal and shifted more into conservatism. Combined with isolation during Covid, mid-life crisis, and having too much money - makes a person behave differently than before.
   
   
   u/djdharmanyc avatar
   djdharmanyc
   • Everything post SNL
   
   
   u/lilmookie avatar
   lilmookie
   • He fired his PR team and started live tweeting weird shit. First thing I can think of is the kids in the Thai cave. Like, it’s bout saving the kids, not about you guy. Have some grace. The cyber truck was like proof positive that his hand was not on the pulse of what’s cool.
   
   I just don’t understand how a guy with so much money isn’t like going to the gym, eating balanced diets, getting tutored, and having a PR team manage things for you. It’s crazy. He should look like a rock star and sound smart. It was (is?) totally within his ability to do so.
   
   
   Haldrivoq
   • started with the cybertruck probably
   
   
   u/Flincher14 avatar
   Flincher14
   • Elon Musk announced he was switching his political support to the Republican party on May 18, 2022. Just one day later, on May 19, 2022, a news story was published detailing a $250,000 settlement paid by SpaceX to a flight attendant who had accused Musk of sexual misconduct
   
   Basically he's a sexual deviant. Drug addict. So naturally he had to go republican where he would be accepted with open arms. As part of that republican crowd he has to adopt all of their crazy positions as well.
   
   
   u/PersonalMidnight715 avatar
   PersonalMidnight715
   • I had a generally a positive view of him. I liked that it looked like he was trying to push on the tech end. The flame thrower kinda made my eyebrows go up, but mostly in a "Get a load of this guy" way. The Thai Tham Luang cave rescue incident was after that and made me figure he was an out of touch, socially deficient rich guy with too many yes-men. What really sunk him was when he started getting involved deeply in politics. He should have stuck to pretending to be Edison pretending to be a genius innovator.
   
   u/Totallyfey avatar
   Totallyfey
   • The day he was born.
   
   u/AuthorIntelligent644 avatar
   AuthorIntelligent644
   •Everyone's talking about when his public image tanked, but what about the man himself? A big question for a lot of people is "was he always like this, or did he change?"
   
   I think it's a little of both.
   
   I think he's always been narcissistic and unbalanced and probably does have some deep psychological issues, but I think he's also been driven and in the past to do some good things. Tesla did help accelerate electrification of cars, and SpaceX got the entire space flight field un-stuck. Those two ventures in particular did impressive important work in the late 2000s and early 20-teens, and Elon deserves some credit for that. No he didn't do much of the engineering, but he got the teams together and got them funded and kept them on mission and that is not as easy as it sounds. I also think that while he's not necessarily a brilliant engineer himself, he knows enough to hire people who are. (Yes I know he didn't found Tesla, but it was on the skids when he bought it.)
   
   I think his downfall came through two things.
   
   The first is a raging narcissism-fueled addiction to validation from others. For people with this issue, social media is like an alcoholic with an open bar tab. As we know, eventually this particular alcoholic bought the bar (Twitter). I think the descent into full-on far-right brain rot came about when his antics turned off a lot of more moderate or liberal/left people (like the Thai cave diver crap), which meant those people were no longer glazing him. A narcissist is an addict. They must have validation from other people. What he figured out pretty quick is that if he pandered to the far right, they would glaze him all day and wouldn't care what he said or did. This was supercharged by social media algorithms that prioritize that type of content because it is more "engaging."
   
   He really seemed to go way off the deep end during COVID, and I think that's because he was spending more time on Twitter.
   
   The second is the collision of his Mars dream with reality. This is the one I think is a bit tragic. The thing is: I do think we could build a settlement on Mars. But I also think it would be orders of magnitude harder than he imagined in his head, and it would take so long that the only thing Elon would be likely to see in his lifetime is an Apollo-style footsteps mission. Through SpaceX, Elon helped push development of the very technology that would make such things possible, but to actually build a settlement on Mars would require many such missions and decades and decades of research and development. Getting to the point that is pictured in SpaceX's renderings of bases on the red planet might take centuries. Terraforming would take millennia.
   
   That's a problem for Elon because he wants quicker wins. He wants it all to be his doing. He can't handle the idea of just pushing the tech forward so somebody else in the year 2063 can set foot on Mars and his childrens' childrens' children might have a chance to live there.
   
   So I think that made him lose interest in his tech dreams to some degree, which led him to fill his brain instead with garbage from social media, and that led to the Elon we now know and do not love.
   
   So TL;DR: I think he was always nuts and always had dickish narcissist tendencies, but in the last 10-12 years he's fallen much deeper into that hole.
   
   It's sad.
   
   Edit: one more thing: the drugs. Drug use is very clearly a problem here, and I think it's helped push him further down the wrong path. I've known heavy drug users before and it often seems to stunt them and prevent them from making positive personality changes. Instead of doing the hard work of confronting your personal demons, they'll just do more drugs. Heavy drug use physically rots your brain too, which doesn't do you any favors.
   
   A lot of the tech-bros that have gone down this crazy fascist path give off serious amphetamine abuse and possibly ketamine abuse vibes. I saw a video of that Karp guy from Palantir a while ago and I really think he's been mething around, to give one example.
   
   u/e37d93eeb23335dc avatar
   e37d93eeb23335dc
   • When he called the person trying to save the kids trapped in the underwater cave a pedophile.
   
   /WendellITStamps avatar
   WendellITStamps
   • He was raised by Nazi millionaires, there was never a fall.
   
   NotYourTypicalMoth
   • In middle/high school, I saw him as a real-life Tony Stark designing rockets, making electric cars mainstream, and using his own funds to build a tunnel to improve traffic. I was young and impressionable, and I also think the whole “calling the cave diver a pedo” only gained traction among people who didn’t care for him.
   
   Right around Covid is when I realized how full of shit he is. Any adult would know he wasn’t engineering rockets and cars, and they’d see how stupid an underground death trap tunnel is, especially when it just functions as another lane (which we all know we just need one more lane to solve traffic /s).
   
   IMO, Elon is popular among the young and dumb like I was, and he’s somewhat popular among people who don’t know anything about him other than he owns an electric car company and a rocket company, and cars+rockets=cool.
   
   Handsupdb
   • The moment Tesla stopped being an exploratory car startup and he actually tried to claim to know something about cars... So like 2014.
   
   You know how someone looks smart until they talk about a subject you know better than them? Yeah that was him with cars.
   
   Cool tech, lots of great engineers and ideas at Tesla. They makes some great products now... But that's in spite of Elon, not because of him.
   
   DemonOfElru
   • After his botched penis surgery, I'd bet.
   
   PanickingKoala
   • June 28, 1971
   
   u/Broad-Ad-4379 avatar
   Broad-Ad-4379
   • I think the first time I realised the extent of his drugs and ‘negative weirdness’ was when he decided to weigh in from nowhere on the Thai cave rescue by proposing some sort of mad submarine idea and then called the rescuer ‘paedo guy’. I’ve since blocked the word ‘musk’ on social media (along with McGregor and Trump), and my feed is so much cleaner. if they’re in the news I’ll hear about it there.
   
   Africanconcrete
   • The whole Thai cave recsue story was when I was like there is something up with this guy.
   
   And as a civil engineer, his Boring Company and their tunneling, its nothing fancy. Normal tunnel, just smaller diameter than what is done for trains and subways etc. They haven't invented anything and just created a highly inefficient transport link that soaks up city budgets and prevents real, effective public transport links from being built.
   
   MattTd7
   • Bro was begging to get on that island and even Epstein didn’t like his ass. He’s been a joke for a looong time now
   
   Commercial_Wave_8108
   • His downfall seems to have started around 2018, when his tweets and public behavior began to raise more eyebrows than admiration. It’s wild how quickly opinions can flip in the public eye.
   
   FloppieTheBanjoClown
   • I can't put specific dates to it, but it was a slow creep.
   
   For a while, he was that eccentric billionaire who bought Tesla and SpaceX and made it his mission to hype them. He was going to change the world, making electric cars viable and space travel cool again. And you know what? He probably did shave a decade or two off both of those. I do think we owe the current Artemis missions and the state of EVs to his investments, both in money and PR.
   
   After a while, we started hearing that those companies had to put in effort to handle him, keep him from interfering in their processes. He fancied himself an engineer and wanted to do more than just bankroll success; he decided he was a genius who was going to come up with the ideas, too.
   
   Then he started doing things like calling a rescue diver a pedophile. He didn't like that his submersible idea didn't get used, so resorted to attacking people. It started becoming evident just how fragile his ego can be.
   
   From here, it sped up. Buying Twitter and destroying the brand. Dogecoin scams. Starship and Cybertruck. Conspiracy theories. Nazi salutes. Election manipulation. He showed us that he not only firmly believed he was the smartest person in the room, but that he was entitled to do whatever he wanted because he had money. He was sure he'd earned him billions through hard work and brilliant insight.
   
   Twenty years ago, Musk was on track to have a page in the history books as a wealthy man who helped drive America into the 21st century. Now he's...this.
   
   u/DiO022 avatar
   DiO022
   • If Books Could Kill has a two part episode on Elon’s downfall that was very good
   
   blastradii
   • Are you Sam Altman ?
   
   Habernotswedish
   • I think it would have been best if Elon never tried to appear in the spotlight and instead only focused on making good products. Of course, as a CEO, he had no choice. However, if he were to have a coCEO, or someone with better social skills than him, it would had saved his reputation.
   
   u/Awpab avatar
   Awpab
   • He has always been eccentric, and when someone that eccentric has that much power, he will be bound to do and say dumb/controversial things. But something definitely happened with him around 2020/2021 where, in hindsight, he started acting differently. Before that, even in his worst moments, like the Thai cave incident, it seemed like a knee-jerk reaction to realizing that his idea was kinda dumb and he got embarrassed and lashed out. But he always was more of a force for good than bad. However, sometime between 2020 and 2022 just seemed to go off the deep end. I'm not sure what really happened, but I was a huge Elon stan, and used to follow his every move, and I definitely believe it was one (or a few) specific events, as opposed to a general downward slope. A bit far-fetched, but I personally think something happened to his brain, based on the similarities between his behaviour and that of my great aunt who had a brain tumor removed and ended up with brain damage, and just his personality, I think he may have attempted to experiment with Neuralink on himself in order to become like Iron Man or something, and it didn't go well.
   
   u/FlirtyFluffyFox avatar
   FlirtyFluffyFox
   • He promised too much and didn't deliver.
   
   Starlink wasn't free. Teslas were expensive. The Tesla museum was never built. The hyperloop was a scam. His rocket company just siphoned money from NASA. Most of his other tech promises didn't even get off the ground.
   
   He basically stole every idea off Slashdot's front page for feasible tech and marketed press release after press release only to fall short in some critical juncture all while pandering to oligarchs.
   
   The Thai cave incident really highlighted what an attention whore he was, but following any of his projects made him a disappointment.
   
   u/Excellent-Duty3927 avatar
   Excellent-Duty3927
   • It was all just a ploy from the start, suckers - that's what he probably will say at some point. But facts speak volumes, he with other people at various companies created an idea that buying Tesla is good for planet, self driving cars, etc, it was all a ploy.
   
   u/ObligatoryContrast avatar
   ObligatoryContrast
   • The cave thing and calling the hero diver a pedophile because he was mad he couldn't be the savior was the first time a lot of people really took a good look at him and came away displeased.
   
   u/Mr_Zee_Speaks avatar
   Mr_Zee_Speaks
   • Shortly after insemination his mom began drinking heavily.
   
   u/Savings_Form_8349 avatar
   Savings_Form_8349
   •
   
   For me it was when he hosted SNL.  Seeing him unfiltered really drove home what a turd he is.
   
   u/Futuremeissuperior avatar
   Futuremeissuperior
   • The Thai cave then I’d say the dogecoin nonsense especially the SNL thing. Really showed how attention hungry he really is. Then obviously the Nazi Salute/Hard anti humanity stances and opinions. Fuck Elon
   
   u/vince_vulgar avatar
   vince_vulgar
   • The Thai cave thing was probably the start but he really sealed the deal during COVID-19 when he was confidently predicting it'd be over in a couple weeks. Months of saying it was no big deal and leaving CA because they wouldn't let him turn his Oakland factory into a superspreader event made him more than just a flippant dickhead. He was never cool again after that.
   
   PineScentedSewerRat
   • April 2020, when he tweeted "free america now" in response to the covid lockdowns. To me, that was the moment when "brilliant space program manager" got superseded by "fucking idiot". It was all downhill from there.
   
   u/Broad-Ad-4379 avatar
   Broad-Ad-4379
   • I remember reading an extended interview with his first wife, from the early PayPal days, and how her friends perceived him, how he ensured she was merely a child-bearer and would never profit financially - and this was long before he was seriously wealthy. I’m sure it’s still online somewhere
   
   u/AteEyes001 avatar
   AteEyes001
   • I think the signs were there and it has slowly compounded, I remember ppl being mad he took credit for Tesla but really he just bought the company from someone, tons of empty promises from car models being released to how important that tunnel was going to be be and so on workers talking about how it sucks to work for him, but really imo what did him in was aligning him self with Trump then their break up.
   
   So I think its slowly just pissed more and ppl off over time and ppl realized he is a bit of a fraud
   
   u/southernpinko avatar
   southernpinko
   • Bombastic empty promises on technology made me suspect of him before 2016 but that year was when the union busting at Tesla got rolling, so that's when he was moved to "actively on my shit list"
   
   u/WhatsUpSteve avatar
   WhatsUpSteve
   • When he drank the magat kool aid.
   
   u/OGD2068 avatar
   OGD2068
   • He was never cool
   
   gamerboy_taken_what
   • The second he was fact checked at all
   
   u/Dry-Performance-2386 avatar
   Dry-Performance-2386
   • When he met Epstein
   
   
   duppyconqueror81
   • Hyperloop was it for me. The conman grifting became too hard to ignore and I lost all respect.
   
   u/Logandh3 avatar
   Logandh3
   • He’s always been a joke and a fucking lunatic, it’s only in the last decade or so, since 2016 (weird coincidence I guess) that he’s felt comfortable outing himself as the talentless, artless, Nazi sympathizing hack chud that he’s always been. And yet finance and crypto bros still worship the fucker.
   
   Rattata4uber
   • When he didn’t cause doge coin to rocket on SNL
   
   Interesting-Camel682
   • Always flawed and entitled, but PayPal actually starts the decline. He has stumbled forward and bought his way from one company to the next. It helped give him the air of genius and legitimatancy. If you look from project to project you can see a ton of failed promises and tax money for "ideas." But truly he believes his own hype, so he will continuously build the castles of sand until they wash away. I think Trump is a lot of what is keeping his sand castles up.
   u/Nearby-Improvement53 avatar
   Nearby-Improvement53
   • Every great man/leader surrounds himself with other great men. It is not long before the great leader becomes less and less tolerant of those who disagree and those who contradict him. Eventually he gets rid of those men. The remaining men learn to never oppose him just to keep their jobs. Soon he is surrounded only by YES men and becomes isolated from reality, the YES men keep feeding him information HE wants to hear. History has proven this time after time. A truly GREAT leader would keep those who contradict and oppose him around, but is wise enough to evaluate their opposition and use it to improve himself and educate himself. Every leader who keeps only YES men around him is doomed to fail.
   
   u/Leading_Clothes7662 avatar
   Leading_Clothes7662
   • He was never an admirable figure. He lied about his story and people bought it because money talks.
   
   If you were introduced to Elon as a rich investor who's money comes from being the heir to an emerald mine in Zambia, instead of the self-made tech genius story you were told, would you have admired him?
   
   TwistyBunny
   • Definitely the incident with the cave rescuers. Otherwise I felt like he was a bit outrageous with his pipe dreams.
   
   u/theluckytwig avatar
   theluckytwig
   • Agreeing with the top comment. Pre Thai Cave diver guy, Elon was pretty well liked as a tech enthusiast and kinda progressive. Ever since then it's just reveal after reveal of his horrid personality. A grifter attaching to anyone who will give it a home. Literally.
   
   Fun_Trick2172
   • He has 800 billion dollars and an army of sycophants that walk into traffic for him.
   
   Vthemechanicv
   • He was always cringe. Paying (iirc) to cameo in Iron Man 2 was the tip of the spear.
   
   Then yeah, the cave thing and his sliding up with trump and right wing nut jobs. When he bought Twitter I think the mask came fully off. It wasn't him getting cozy with fascists to get tax breaks and favors, it was just he's a fascist.
   
   Personally I never "liked" him. I've always disliked the private space industry so SpaceX was always a private business getting public dollars grift to me. "Tesla" as a car company felt gross. Same spirit as Palintir as domestic spy software frankly. You listen to Behind the Bastards of him, and he sounds like someone who was born rich - genuinely worked hard - then got super lucky with the Zip2 buyout. But he talks like someone absolutely obvlivous to how much was handed to him on an emerald platter, and that would grind my gears even if he wasn't a sad little Nazi wannabe.
   
   EAP007
   • Somewhere between his dick inside underaged kids on Epstein island and his dick being deep inside Trump
   
   u/yeyeyeyeyeyeyay avatar
   yeyeyeyeyeyeyay
   • he always was a piece of shit. the way he scammed and bullied himself to the top through so many people and companies.
   
   u/Forkastning avatar
   Forkastning
   • Many people cite the moment when he accused a diver who saved kids to be a pedo.
   
   My contempt for Musk started earlier, with his car in space (such a waste of resources) and with his flamethrower. He gave the vibe of a billionaire douchebag who refused to grow up, who tried real hard to be cool and who tried real hard to be relatable.
   
   What's wild is that all those events happened only a few months apart, all in 2018. Even the diver incident.
   
   
   

   Lordcthulhu17
   • He was always bad, it's just the flood of zirp and techno optimism of the late aughts and early 10's gave him a lot of cover
   
   MajesticAnimator456
   • For me he was never ever ever ever ever in a position to "fall". Rich people are the bane of human existence and they should all be in prison.
   
   u/-FakeAccount- avatar
   -FakeAccount-
   • When he called that thai guy a pedo was the first time i questioned him. When he destroyed our government with DOGE i stopped supporting him completely.
   
   CommissionFeisty9843
   • Right after the doctor slapped his ass
   
   Select-Protection-75
   • His kid transitioning was the start of his villain arc
   
   u/swiwwcheese avatar
   swiwwcheese
   • We already knew he is an insensitive self-centered jerk... (Thaï cave)
   
   ...But his tweeting disinfo about COVID and vaccines, gave him away as someone who does not respect the scientific method and ethics
   
   The image of him as a 'man of science' that he nurtured, evaporated that day, exposing him as a fraud in that area
   
   His 'roman salute' was the absolute nail in the coffin
   
   u/Alfredo_Commachio avatar
   Alfredo_Commachio
   • I think the Thai cave thing which is what a bunch of other commenters have posted is definitely when his public persona started to take a hit.
   
   This comes off a little arrogant--but at least for me and some of the communities I am active in, Elon was never viewed that positively. Long before he was getting into politics, I viewed him as "doing some cool stuff and it's good someone is doing it, but he's also fundamentally a fraud." This is because some real basic factual reality was always revealing that things Elon said were usually not true, and things he promised were never delivered.
   
   But he was clearly operating in a mode of "promise a lot that I'll never deliver, but deliver enough to keep people happy", and that's largely what he was able to do with Tesla and SpaceX. If you were actually deep into space nerdery, you long knew he had lied about the capabilities of his rockets forever, and never delivered what he said he could when he said he could--in fact some stuff he promised 20 years ago in regards to rocketry have still yet to be achieved. But he was delivering a lot, there was just this consistent gap between things he delivered vs things he said, and the only logical conclusion one could have would be: this man is fundamentally dishonest.
   
   Before he started to get into culture war issues, I think people who understood this about Elon still felt that despite being a liar, he was "lying for good reasons", and still doing real work that had value, so it was given a pass so to speak.
   
   I was more of the mind--I don't trust figures who serially lie and make grandiose claims, so even if I can respect some of the things Elon's companies did, I don't trust Elon the person.
   
   I wish I had found a way to monetize my feelings on Elon because I was certainly vindicated on them eventually.
   
   
   plum_stupid
   • Union busting in 2017.
   
   
   Saw-It-Again-
   • Grimes left him for a trans person and he became a virulent transphobe.
   
   
   pabmendez
   •He put profits over people's health
   
   
   u/Business_Door4860 avatar
   Business_Door4860
   • He was always on odd ball, but he made the mistake of thinking his knowledge of and opinion in politics should be made known on a large platform. To not realize you will lose support by those who you speak against is really bad business practice.
   
   
   SolidPoint
   • When he flew satellites over Ukraine and challenged Putin to a fight- thats when Russian trolls started chipping at his public image
   
   He… sorta took it from there, though
   
   SparePartSociety
   • When he accused the lead of the rescue team for the Thai school kids of being a pedophile bc he was too f’n stupid to understand that his submersible wouldn’t fit. Elon is a moron. A rich moron whose mommy always told him he was the smartest boy in the world
   
   
   ectorPunk
   • I wrote E-Musky hate on my twitter as early as 2016-2017. I'm glad I always knew.
   u/coolguyhentaisenpai avatar
   coolguyhentaisenpai
   • His downfall is his deep desire for attention. Its ALWAYS been there, even if you only started paying attention after the Thai cave pedo shit. No one should be put on a pedestle like that. Doesnt matter how intelligent or genius you are. Its a fucking red flag when someone is painted out to be a fantasy characature of a super science philanthropist.
   
   
   u/saskanxam avatar
   saskanxam
   • I was in engineering school starting in 2013, and no one with any understanding of the industry thought he was the genius inventor he made himself out to be. We all knew he just bought companies that were already doing these things, the people putting him on a pedestal were wanna-be tech bros.
   
   But at that time it was just “roll your eyes at the guy normies think is IRL Tony Stark”
   
   
   

   u/seacat8586 avatar
   seacat8586
   • Few answers are simple; this is the exception. His downfall started when he favored some policies of the right. It doesn’t matter what you’ve accomplished, how much good you’ve done or anything else if you’re go against the tribe. Bill Marr (sp?), Ezra Klein and many others know this.
   
   
   u/No-Engineering-239 avatar
   No-Engineering-239
   • Hyperloop. Insanely dumb idea.
   
   
   DepthExtended
   • When he bought Twitter. I knew that was a mistake. He is not socialized enough to be in charge of one the planets largest social networks. I predicted back then to several around me that this was the beginning of his end.
   
   
   
   /Big_Statistician2566 avatar
   Big_Statistician2566
   •
   
   I don't know if it is true, but I heard a story that he used to have a personal assistant that did a lot of PR work for him. After a few years she asked to take a vacation and when she came back he fired her saying he could do it all himself. Since then, he has been just spouting off with all his crazy, racist BS. With no one to fix his issues he went from a left wing icon to the poster boy for the radical right.
   
   
   u/Background-Sale3473 avatar
   Background-Sale3473
   • Thunderfoot started doing videos on his lies roughly 10years ago. I'dd say it became really clear at around 8years ago so ~2017-2018
   
   
   Sp00nD00d
   • Cave diver fiasco.
   
   u/Financial_Calendar77 avatar
   Financial_Calendar77
   • When he meets the engineer
   
   u/Alive-Ad6945 avatar
   Alive-Ad6945
   • I'll always mention the Nazi salute
   
   
   u/StBlandine7 avatar
   StBlandine7
   • People in tech have known about his reputation as a bad boss looooong before any of the Trump stuff
   
   
   KeepAnEyeOnYourB12
   • I thought he was dangerous even 12 years ago because that kind of money should not be in the hands of an individual. I've hated him since he put a car into space for his ego.
   
   u/Eccentric755 avatar
   Eccentric755
   • We saw him as a joke 20 years ago.
   
   u/86_Ambitions avatar
   86_Ambitions
   • I thought he was a moron after watching that documentary about him back in like 2010. I have AIM messages with friends from back then where we are all roasting him.
   
   Spdoink
   • When he told the Government that cars cannot be manufactured from home. And that intubating people with Covid at high pressure killed them.
   
   JustAwesome360
   • For me it was when he bought Twitter. I was a little suspicious after the cave thing but I brushed it off because I loved SpaceX and Tesla so much.
   
   3Uclide
   • All I remember is liking him before COVID. Went downhill afterwards
   
   u/LPQFT avatar
   LPQFT
   • Hyperloop. That was also the first time I heard of him and I already had a feeling he was a fraud. I thought of him just as another one of these snake oil salesmen but I would never have imagined he was much worse. But I think the thing that summarizes his whole existence is this: He claimed to be the among the best Quake player in the world at one point in time. Even if it was true it would have been meaningless since he only played at a time where competition was weak. But he still calimed that because he's a poser and that's all his whole personality is.
   
   Thotfullawful
   • When he started seeing grimes, I don’t know what drugs they started doing together but you noticed a shift especially when azalea banks came forward about them essentially trapping her to try and force her into a threesome. They still had multiple kids together, one who he used as a human shield after that CEO was killed. But I think he constant drug abuse during their relationship and there out triggered a lot of paranoia. He was already crazy, I mean she was his 7th baby mama I think, but he could hide it. Now it’s like he has no control over himself.
   
   Staysayo
   • I became an Elon fan in my 30s after reading an exceptional blog called "Wait, but why?" whose information was based off of the book by Ashley Vance. He inspired me to become the person I was afraid to be and I've reached much personal success because of it.
   
   But after the cave incident I realized who the person really was and he is not someone to model.
   
   StaleSalesSnail
   • When he had his cameo in Iron Man 2.
   
   u/Lucifernistic avatar
   Lucifernistic
   • Basically once he started getting active on twitter and becoming political.
   
   I still think his early days are quite inspiring- funding SpaceX with his own PayPal fortune for 19 failed attempts and just barely making it by getting it right with months of runway left is still, to me, and very cool story.
   
   Sucks that he went of the rails and had his ego inflated to historic proportions, and generally showed himself to be a POS. I think his companies have generally been a positive force in humanity, but that only highlights even more starkly how much he himself is an egotistical maniac.
   
   Berael
   • Everyone who's actually known him, ever, have always thought he's a creepy weirdo and a loser. He just had a good PR team.
   
   Once he started openly saying that he's a Nazi, the PR team gave up.
   
   Responsible-Fun2600
   • After his cameo in an Iron Man movie haha
   
   u/Aughlnal avatar
   Aughlnal
   • When he announced 'his original' Hyperloop idea
   
   macgilla
   • I had to look up the cave thing to see what year it was (2018). 2020 in Korea he was still seen as a inspiring figure (like Steve jobs...) to high schoolers learning English, but that his name started to fade around 2022/3. I'd say language issues explains the longer shelf life here
   
   u/sceadwian avatar
   sceadwian
   • His downfall started with the Hyperloop.
   
   Vegetable_Pineapple2
   • For me I think it was once most people realized rich people in general don't start from the bottom and work hard like they claim, but in Elons case it was way worse. He's a super wealthy immigrant who had slaves in the 80s from south Africa. The whole image he tried selling of himself making it from nothing just blew up when that was released. It just got worse from there.
   
   
   u/Accurate-Race1897 avatar
   Accurate-Race1897
   • You grew wiser and realized he's always been that way
   
   u/AlarmingTurnover avatar
   AlarmingTurnover
   • He was always a piece of shit, people just ignored it for years until Trump got in office the first time. He's literally recorded as messaging Epstein in 2012.
   
   ThankGod4Darwin69
   • Around the same time he bought Twitter
   
   u/Real-Boss6760 avatar
   Real-Boss6760
   • He was always a lucky, privileged douchebag.
   
   One of the things the internet did was empower a whole generation of 90s-era kids into thinking they were the next Bruce Wayne.
   
   But all they were was some kids that learned HTML before everyone else, and knew how to sell used cars well enough that they could talk other wealthy idiots into giving them money.
   
   Elon was never a genius. He was just at the right place at the right time. And possessed enough "don't give a fuck" that he's fine stomping out partners just to give his ego the boost it needs.
   
   TL/DR he's always been a piece of shit human. As he's gotten more money, he's cared less and less about hiding that part of himself from the public.
   
   
   
   u/Street-Badger avatar
   Street-Badger
   • He started talking to the Russians on the reg, and then drugs and the manosphere shit followed.
   
   
   
   
   
   u/lowerdark avatar
   lowerdark
   • said he was top 20 in diablo 4 hardcore difficulty, very much doubt someone like him have time to play that much and that efficient...
   
   the proof came when he played path of exile 2 and he was streaming his gameplay while flying, he was also playing some top 20 hardcore character in that game(path of exile 2), unfortunatelly he did not understand any of the endgame stuff which makes it straight up impossible to get top 20, let alone on hardcore difficulty...
   
   so yeah he got his account boosted in both games, i would actually much rather see him struggle early game, that would at least give some gamer points that this guy actually plays game, but no he only cheats.
   
   u/dope_danny avatar
   dope_danny
   • In some circles he had always been seen as a dumbass nepo baby. For thirty years he kept trying to name every website or company he worked for “X” because “its badass” and his partners always shot him down.
   
   In the 2010’s he hired publicists to rebrand him as irl tony stark but people that knew of him have always considered him more of a randy pitchford type but with nazi grandparents.
   
   Striking_Dependent11
   • I was under rock during Thai cave controversy so for me it was during COVID when he forced people to work during lockdown, shared conspiracies, cut pay and fired bunch of people.
   
   Nick_Lange_
   • A rich white dude from South Africa should never be an idol.
   
   Rich people in general.
   
   Dracasethaen
   • He had one fight with his trans kid and felt so animately and disrespected, that his authority was challenged, he went full right-leaning for ego validation.
   
   Narocroc10
   • Well, you see, in 2018 a group of junior footballers got trapped in a cave in Thailand....
   
   u/muaddib8989 avatar
   muaddib8989
   • Biden spurned him at the White House EV summit and he began a rightwing theater actor thereafter
   
   krkrich
   • He peaked when he went on SNL. It's been a steady downfall since then.
   
   Reddittee007
   • Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
   
   I'm not sure when that moment was for me but his treatment of what was then SpaceX and Tesla employees is what did it for me.
   
   I witnessed it first hand while working as service tech for some of the machinery in his plants. I was also offered a position and declined as fast and as strongly as I could.
   
   u/Human-Abrocoma7544 avatar
   Human-Abrocoma7544
   • I think the downfall started after the first Joe Rogan Podcast appearance. He got a lot of attention for smoking weed and I feel like he liked being in the news.
   
   PoniardBlade
   • For me, the possible election tampering and what really really did it for me was that Nazi salute! I still see things like Space X and Tesla as necessary things, few others have had success as much as those, and I don't think badly of them getting $$$ from the government to continue. Tesla is way over valued, but that's market things, not government. Yes, other companies are working on reusable rockets, but Booster and Starship will be amazing if they pull off half of what they want.
   
   u/DapperViking avatar
   DapperViking
   • His downfall began when he was born.
   
   His dad is married to his step sister.
   
   His father is a racist rapist. Elon never had a chance. Learn literally anything about Errol Musk and youll see it isn't much different than learning about Hitler's own father figure and the effect they had. Monsters are made in childhoods more horrible than you can imagine.
   
   beaux_with_an_x
   • There is a great episode on this on A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein from December 2024. It’s pre-DOGE so it really just focuses on what made him so weird. Very illuminating
   
   u/Big_Kiwi_706 avatar
   Big_Kiwi_706
   • Tesla cars were hitting the road with atrocious build quality. Cybertruck window breaking gaff. Stretching himself too thin with the idea of the hyperloop.
   
   Also a lot of people caught on that Tesla was largely subsidized by the US government so he built that company off of americans backs, not cool.
   
   u/AmericanScream avatar
   AmericanScream
   • If you learn of his history, you'll find he was a horrible human being from the very beginning.
   
   The story of how he took over Tesla and screwed the original founders is one everybody should know about.
   
   u/cannibalparrot avatar
   cannibalparrot
   • It was the pedo comment in that Thai cave thing.
   
   If he had kept his mouth shut nobody would have noticed how awful he is, but then he decided to fully drop the mask.
   
   u/kevinblau avatar
   kevinblau
   • It started when he wanted to become the leader of humanities first Mars colony. This is not a joke, he is willing to sacrifice everything for the goato make it into history books. l
   
   Diknak
   • COVID is when it happened. The lockdown rotted his brain as he showed his true self to the world.
   
   Moneywanted
   • He was always a dick for so many reasons. He just doesn’t care about people knowing it now.
   
   Redeyebandit87
   • When he dated Grimes and started doing drugs and acting hella weird
   
   No-Falcon-4996
   • When he rigged the Pennsylvania voting machines to throw America off the cliff into violent fascism.
   
   cold_tap_hot_brew
   • I seem to remember an inappropriate unicorn emoji comment on Twitter was when I was like “ohhh, this guys not smart smart.” 🦄
   
   Please_PM_Nips
   • I think it was his first appearance on Joe Rogan. If not then it was when he bought Twitter. If not then it was the Cybertruck release with the bowling ball.
   
   Krasnystaw_
   • Is there any boomer here, who dressed as Getty?
   
   dreaming_in_Octarine
   • I think the big turning point was covid. He had been near universally worshipped to that point.
   
   Suddenly all Tesla factory workers had to stop working and require wages nonetheless. Elon opposed that, and that was probably down to the business making conistant losses. It would scare any buisiness person.
   
   I think what he was not prepared for was the wave of people online suddenly hating him for it. It snowballed from there.
   
   Feisty-Problem516
   • If you like graphic novels, Elon Musk: American Oligarch by Darryl Cunningham does a great job chronologically depicting his life (and family).
   
   EngragedOrphan
   • Behind the scenes he did a lot of anti infrastructure cloak and dagger stuff (in America) on issues such as High Speed Rails. I didn't fall for his marketed persona due to him being a regressive on public transport.
   
   I want trains and it is disgusting he is a big part in killing modern public infrastructure for trains, he did this because he thought he was going to take over the car market. I hope his foot gets run over by one in minecraft.
   
   JonnyRottensTeeth
   • Not exactly sure but ketamine probably had something to do with it
   
   teebles22
   • I can't remember exactly when but it's probably along the lines of all these Tesla promises not remotely coming true. I do remember before thinking this guy was like "real life Tony Stark" and how cool it is to try and push EVs. Slowly though the stories of his personal life also creeped in about fathering many children with different women, the talk and then back out of buying Twitter (and then getting sued to do it anyways), of course then allowing a lot of terrible people back on Twitter, eventually DOGE, and now all that bullshit about using his other companies to merge together and somehow con a trillion dollar company IPO? He has enough damn money!
   
   
   Garlicroastedpotato
   • For most people it was the pedo comment. A guy saves the lives of a dozen children trapped in a cave in Thailand and he's on Twitter being jealous that no one liked his mini sub concept.
   
   For me it was when he started doing a press tour talking about how he slept at Tesla making sure it got built and expecting his engineers to put in more hours than their contract. It's not like Microsoft where Bill Gates rewarded the engineers by giving them stock and turning them all into millionaires/billionaires. He was purposely burning these people out and churning out replacements like crazy. These weren't his friends. He didn't bond with them by working with them. He was their overlord and he stayed there to make them work harder... not work hard himself.
   
   u/Delicious_Drop_1150 avatar
   Delicious_Drop_1150
   • There was a time when he was being portrayed as like a real-life Tony Stark. I think his little venemous meltdown at being told his services weren't necessary at that Thailand cave rescue is where it started though.
   
   Senior-Jellyfish-816
   • I remember disliking him when he and grimes started dating and I found out she was the only woman he followed on twitter lol I thought that was bizarre and a huge red flag lol
   
   Queasy-Wathog-3642
   • I don't remember exactly when but it was when I read his marriage vows in an article.. .absolutely batshit.
   
   u/Lost_Discipline avatar
   Lost_Discipline
   • I lost any respect I might have had when I learned he sued the actual founders of Tesla to claim he was a “founder” despite being nothing more than a near-hostile takeover investor.
   
   praxis_rebourne
   • We tend to think that we are too smart to be susceptible to great PR. But we were, Musk's public persona probably became too involved online for the PR to remain effective. 2018 might be the point most of us realized, but he's likely been the same person for decades.
   
   Crizzacked
   • the nazi salutes 100%
   
   Constant-Prog15
   • I never paid him much attention, so I’d say I was neutral about him (or as neutral as I am toward any billionaire). For me, the disgust came when I realized he’d named Tesla models: S3XY
   
   
   DingBat_77
   • I don't know exactly but I first thought he went bad was when he first was named richest man in the world.
   
   Frostbeard
   • When he publicly joined Trump’s inner circle in term 1 early on. This was when the mask slipped for me. Before that I was willing to believe he was at least trying to fulfill some grandiose vision for human progress, but to me that made it crystal clear it was always about money and control.
   
   
   u/Sensitive-Wind-7888 avatar
   Sensitive-Wind-7888
   • Either his first time trying special K
   
   
   u/Friendlyfire2996 avatar
   Friendlyfire2996
   • Birth
   
   
   JealousDebate6062
   • He had good pr with little blips like the Thai cave but covid is when it started
   
   
   
   tbodillia
   • Elon has always been a joke, but was surrounded by fanboyz.
   
   
   Longjumping-Log1591
   • 'member when he bought votes for a million dollars per vote and didnt get in trouble?
   
   LostinLies1
   • When I found out he never really created anything…he just glommed onto technology that had already been built by others and pretended to have invented it.
   
   A good person always tosses the credit back to those who have done the work. He stands on the shoulders of greatness and rather that tread lightly he stomps.
   
   Texasdeathtrip
   • “Here’s $250,000. Please don’t tell anyone I showed you my penis”
   
   u/SlimKillaCam avatar
   SlimKillaCam
   • After Iron Man 2, he probably paid someone to build him an Iron Man suit and it didn’t actually fly so he went apeshit and blamed liberals then reverted back to his South African family roots, decided he was god, convinced a bunch of women to build him an army of children then lived in twitter for way too long.
   
   
   Divinecheese720
   • I'm not sure, but I started thinking he was full of shit on some subjects when he said they could build a hyperloop from New Orleans (where I'm from and live) to Baton Rogue underground and it wouldn't flood. How does one build an underground tunnel thru a swamp that is affected by hurricanes thar is never gonna flood? How are you gonna build an underground tunnel in land that's below sea level and you'd hit water after a few feet at most?
   
   
   NoCaterpillar2051
   • For most people it was when he went nuts during Covid. For me it was the top gear thing.
   
   
   
   u/WhyYesMaybeNo avatar
   WhyYesMaybeNo
   • He’s largely a silver-spoon man-child who spent decades getting the credit for other people’s work and ideas.
   
   Within the last decade or so, he started going onto all kinds of media and trying to portray himself as “the genius expert” on more and more things (different ideas, technologies, underwater cave rescues, politics, even games, etc).
   
   And here’s the thing: Musky is stupid. Back when he stayed out of the spotlight and just took the credit for a couple big things, people thought “oh he must be a really smart inventor!”
   
   But now people hear him talk utter idiocy about many different things. When someone hears him talk nonsense about something they personally know a lot about - they realize that Musky was probably talking out his ass about everything else too.
   
   
   Frybreadrecipe
   • He always sucked but the mask came off when he went on the Joe Rogan show and pretended to inhale.
   
   
   u/Middle_Following_369 avatar
   Middle_Following_369
   • Fckn loser
   
   
   rlywhatever
   • Imo there was a very distinct moment when he had a call with putin. I guarantee you poo then told him that he has someting on Elon that he would hate becoming public. Musk's behaviour and actions changed 180 degrees after that. musk was not acting independently anymore. Poo puppeteered orange poo's & musk's alliance so that musk would rig elections and make orange poo a pres
   
   
   u/ganjaccount avatar
   ganjaccount
   • What you're seeing isn't his downfall. It's America's downfall. Allow me to explain.
   
   Musk was born to an Apartheid rich guy who made millions from owning a bareley-a-step-up-from-slavery emerald mine. When Apartheid fell, and a lot of white people were nervous because "bleck" people suddenly had rights, the rich slave labor guy sent his progeny to America.
   
   Musk threw some money around and got lucky that some of it went to paypal. He took credit for paypal because his slave money supported the people who actually built it. Then several money throwing adventures later, he bought into Tesla, ousted the people who actually built the company, and immediately took to a new grift - grifting us. All of us.
   
   Musk succeeded where his peers (Elizabeth Holmes, for example) failed because he understood that pitching bullshit products isn't enough. You need a personal brand. He spent a ton of money building a persona of a tech genius billionaire a la Tony Stark. Then he jumped on the issue of the day, climate change, and told everyone he was going to fix it. Really, what he did was convince democrat politicians that they could get rich by throwing government money his way. Tesla put out an OK car that had the advantage of being, if not first, at least first practical to market. And he promised a lot. His magic tester could detect diseases from just a drop of blo... wait, sorry, I got them confused for moment. His magic car would save the world and even drive itself! Give me money and I will save you. When the "in two years we will be able to provide in home testing for every disease known to man..." Goddamnit. "In two years car accidents will be history!!" GIve me MONEY!!
   
   When Trump rose, he understood that all that "I'm smart" and "I'll save the world" shit was not going to keep the money flowing. So he pivoted to the cyber truck strategy. He started acting like the biggest idiot (not too hard, really), putting out stupid, performative vehicle targeted at stupid, performative people, and started role playing Hitler. It's an instant in with the right wing crowd. Now he gets a ton of money, and gets more bang for the corruption buck because Republican politicians let him just go in and fuck up every agency that had ever made an action against him. And he could steal all the data he wanted.
   
   You aren't seeing Musk's downfall. You are seeing Musk's success story. You are seeing America's downfall. Musk is who he has always been. He's a broken, racist, creepy, immoral grifter. He is Trump with a bit more business savvy. You thought he was a genius because he told you he was a genius, and you knew nothing about him that would tell you otherwise. Now you have more information, and that's the only thing that changed.
   
   TheRabadoo
   • I knew someone whose cousin started Tesla, and he told us all about how the court had to order them to credit the guys who started it after Elon tried to take credit for everything. I’ve know he was a stupid asshole since around ‘07. People used to tell me I was dumb/being a jerk when I said he wasn’t a genius inventor, nor was he a decent person. Time has only proven me right.
   
   u/Substantial-Tale5564 avatar
   Substantial-Tale5564
   • he always sucked
   biscoito1r
   • When ThunderF00t made videos about him.
   
   u/Mental_Internal539 avatar
   Mental_Internal539
   • I always thought he was odd and knew he was homophobic before Tesla's were on the road. He's always been public about it so none of this is new.
   
   u/AdministrativeEgg440 avatar
   AdministrativeEgg440
   • The only other person Ive ever seen squander so much public goodwill was Bill Cosby being out there raping everyone
   
   foolonthe
   • When he did that Simpsons episode I knew immediately that he was evil.
   
   So about 2015/2016
   
   davster99
   • I sold my TSLA shares a few days after he smoked a joint in an interview.
   
   Skynetcoder
   • I think we can pinpoint to the exact tweet, where he insulted that cave rescue diver.
   
   Grslydruid
   • When he started going on Rogan. His public persona completely changed after that.
   
   u/demi_berry avatar
   demi_berry
   • What did it for me was when he sued the original Tesla founders because he wanted to be labeled a Tesla cofounder, even though he was just an investor that eventually took over. People don’t get to buy their way into an existing company and then decide to call themselves a “founder”.
   
   u/TuverMage avatar
   TuverMage
   • for me, its when he started spending time of social media. Elon unfiltered showed us how he really was when before that we got to only see a well cultivated view of him.
   
   u/CMaxed avatar
   CMaxed
   • The biography Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson can shed some light on that.
   
   Not nearly as good / revealing as the Steve Jobs book by the same author... feels more groomed by the subject.
   
   I liked and/or respected Elon considerably less after reading that book - and it ended in 2023, right before he went full DOGE.
   
   Wingnutmcmoo
   • To people paying attention... It was when you were dressing up as him when you were a kid. I was in my 20s and all my friends made fun of him and called him trash.
   
   So you just didn't know you were rooting for the bad guy. Which makes sense because you were a child.
   
   u/NinjaSellsHonours avatar
   NinjaSellsHonours
   • Around when he got kicked out of PayPal for being an idiot, I think
   
   u/Denver80211 avatar
   Denver80211
   • He's always been a sack of shit. People just didn't catch on. He didn't invent telsa -he bought it and fucked it. Cybertruck might be his only real contribution. Without knowing, i suspect it's all his design given how shitty it is. Space X.. someone else's deal. He's just a rich dork
   
   damageddude
   • 2016 when it was determined that Elon somehow obtained a notebook sent by a 9-year old in Texas to NASA in 1989 about how to make reusable rockets with propulsive landings. /s
   
   DadOnTheInternet
   • The nazi salute was it for me
   
   Cheese_Pancakes
   • I didn't originally know much about him other than his roles with Tesla and SpaceX. I actually really respected him for the work SpaceX was doing.
   
   What made me to begin to lose respect for him was his behavior online and the way he treated the employees of Twitter when he bought it. I saw that picture of him walking in carrying a sink (i.e. "let that sink in") around the time I read that he fired like 2/3 of the employees on the spot. It seemed really shitty to me.
   
   When he was doing the DOGE thing, it was even worse. I work as a contractor to the federal government and saw first hand how it was being handled. New federal hires are on a probationary period for the first year, meaning they can very easily be let go for almost any reason. After that year passes, it's pretty difficult for them to lose their jobs. I was actively applying to federal positions at the time, but am glad I didn't get picked up because they pretty much fired all the probationary employees on the spot - regardless of their job performance, how important the projects were that they were working on, or what it would do to the productivity of said projects in general. Luckily a judge overturned that and a lot of those probationary feds were allowed to return to work some time later.
   
   They also made a lot of unnecessary changes to policies, specifically designed to make the feds I worked around as miserable as possible in their jobs in order to get them to quit. There was also some sort of link they were all sent where they could choose to retire early on the spot, while getting paid for the rest of the year. It was good for the older folks who were close to retirement, but a lot of younger feds I know took it out of fear because they didn't know if they were going to get unceremoniously fired in a few months anyway. Some of the people I talked to who didn't take it told me that there was no guarantee they'd even be able to follow through on their promises to those people who took the deal. They didn't even have any sort of plan in writing, according to them.
   
   It was absolute chaos. All they cared about was numbers. The supposed goal was to lower government spending, but it was like doing surgery with a sledgehammer. Musk didn't seem to care what he broke by firing everyone blindly - just that he could say he cut spending by x amount. It was a really scary time to be in my line of work.
   
   
   Fantastic-Aside7041
   • when he disowned his child out of bigotry. full disclosure i always hated him and never understood why anybody would admire him.
   
   Iamapatientgir1
   • I worked at Tesla for a very long time, and for a period of time a woman named Valerie Capers Workman was the CHRO - it’s my understanding that they became very close and Elon respected her a lot. I personally think her influence kept him “in line” and made him a better CEO - in that he’d say “the right things” or seem to care about his employees and their experience to some degree. When she left at the end of 2021, internally, I think there was a lot of turmoil and he came away from it feeling betrayed (for lack of a better word). I trace the rapid growth of his anti-DEI sentiments back to this, and I think he really started to lose touch with reality. I noticed his twitter activity getting more erratic and leaning more into the edgelord garbage when he didn’t have someone around reminding him to be respectful and stop punching down.
   
   Anonymousart3
   • Elon was never cool, and was always a joke.
   
   However, even I was fooled by him for so long. He first popped up on my radar back when he was entering the space stuff with spacex. But, when you go to his roots with PayPal, he NEVER built PayPal, he just bought the company that would become PayPal using money he got from his rich family. In fact, be wanted to remember the company to X. But, when that didn't go over well, PayPal was coined instead.
   
   Then he claimed he built PayPal. And everyone just... Believed him.
   
   It's the same garbage with Tesla.
   
   And then is you think about spacex... NASA abandoned the reusable rocket because the economics NEVER will work. And here comes Elon, saying that an impossible thing is possible. And now he gets more money from the government than NASA did for the same task.
   
   u/MyThinThighs avatar
   MyThinThighs
   • He's a billionaire idiot who has a mind for two things, rockets and ketamine
   
   Politically he's a pawn who bought twitter so he could make it privately owned and turn it into a maga Donald Trump echo chamber. Used that to jump on Trump's campaign. And used that to get a position as the head of a new gov org named after a dated internet meme "DOGE". Doge has been disbanded and split into different groups and elon musk has been shunned and laughed at by Trump and maga at large. A failed pathetic grab for power by a pathetic man.
   
   Personally he's just a desperate weirdo who doesn't know as much as he wants people to think so he embarrasses himself talking about coding or politics. Him trying to pass off is path of exile account as unpaid and something he actually spent time playing was pathetic as fuck from someone who could outright buy the company that made the game.
   
   u/Willing_Sink_3623 avatar
   Willing_Sink_3623
   • I knew when the model s was introduced, then the model x cemented his legacy as a fraud.  The mandarin elon trump. 
   
   
   u/Chiiro avatar
   Chiiro
   • The moment he was born. His father supported Nazism and he taught that support to his son.
   
   u/Infinite-Penalty-736 avatar
   Infinite-Penalty-736
   • His downfall began when he was hatched.
   
   u/ErinFiqsette avatar
   ErinFiqsette
   • Mars...it was BS, and always will be.
   
   TKG1607
   • When he came out as a Republican supporter and started doing really stupid and racist shit for attention
   
   DataPhreak
   • Purchasing X was really the end for him.
   
   SkyHawk3613
   • When he started getting involved in politics
   
   peet192
   • It started when he started lying about autopilot.
   
   u/Key_Connection_6599 avatar
   Key_Connection_6599
   • When he opened his mouth. 😴
   
   u/ZynthCode avatar
   ZynthCode
   • All went downhill from when Elmo had the Cyberstuck demo (the one where they broke two windows).
   
   u/IntrepidBoard3634 avatar
   IntrepidBoard3634
   • When he suggested tunneling as a way to solve traffic followed by the renderings and video of his vision of what it would like.
   
   I knew he was full of shit and started to see him for what he is: a skilled grifter able to suckle and scam the US taxpayer out of as much money as is humanly possible.
   
   WhyIsItSoBig
   • The moment he got on Joe Rogan's podcast for me and was bragging about trying to get stock price to $420. I was a highschooler then and all the kiddos back then put him on a pedestal.
   
   u/Swfsundae8420 avatar
   Swfsundae8420
   • So many people liked him and admired him until this last election and all that he has said and done to harm Americans and getting involved in dirty politics. I have lost all respect for him and wish something would happen to make him humble and bring him to his knees but I know the chances of that are highly unlikely.
   
   u/JunkySundew11 avatar
   JunkySundew11
   • I still think of that one Boyinaband video about him and chuckle
   
   Rinzwind
   • all the things mentioned already. Naming his kid X Æ A-Xii  was an indicator for me too.
   
   6FootHalfling
   • It's easy to say with hindsight that it began at any point in his time in the public eye, but the hype machine around him that down played his (shall we generously say) exaggerations of his involvement with PayPal and Tesla beyond buying them and saying "I made dis."
   
   For me personally it was during the months leading up to the enXitification of Xitter. He largely wasn't an my radar at all before that long series of public meltdowns. The SNL appearance is as a good a "moment" as any if you want a more precise date. And, that could have gone so much worse for him.
   
   MapleHamwich
   • Realistically, it was way back, when Tesla started missing deliveries and promises. Hell, you could argue it became obvious when he embraced the iron man comparisons, or after his first divorce, etc. there were many signs at many points along the way.
   
   The average person though, wasn't paying attention. Publically, I'd say his first big stock market investigation.
   
   u/idontknow_atall avatar
   idontknow_atall
   • for those of us who knew anything about the subjects he talked about online, it was immediately when he first opened his mouth. before doge, before spacex, before the cybertruck, before he called that guy a pedo.
   
   the moment he entered capitalism as some kind of icon, those of us who knew anything about engineering and technology knew he was the monorail guy.
   
   people need to start listening to their anti-capitalist friends and family, we're right more often than anyone else, often earlier too.
   
   u/technoholican avatar
   technoholican
   • Read a book about him 2016, instant sour taste even the book was generally admiring him.
   
   Bigdrubowski
   • My opinion turned when he shot that Tesla roadster up into space as additional payload and it was playing "Rocket Man" or something else waaay too on the nose. Lets not send more random shit up into space, and lets not be cringe about what we do.
   
   CoachSleepy
   • I distrust billionaires implicitly, but problems with safety at Tesla have been known since 2017 I think, which was enough to convince me he was not the genius humanitarian he was presented as.
   
   u/Thin-Discipline1673 avatar
   Thin-Discipline1673
   • When the load went from his Dad and into his escort Mom.
   
   u/canteloupy avatar
   canteloupy
   • I probably first heard of him when he announced his stupid Mars colonization project in 2016 and immediately classified him in the "delusional narcissist" bucket.
   
   u/kakallas avatar
   kakallas
   • Remember to never worship rich men and you’ll never be disappointed by their inevitable fall. Rich men control you like you’re a pathetic little puppet. They are not admirable.
   
   u/larsonman avatar
   larsonman
   • I mean, he’s always been this way. However before he started ripping fat lines of white lightning and god knows what else before going into very public spaces, there was an illusion that he might just have the resources to pull off cashing the checks he was writing. Now we’re all painfully aware that he’s just an acoustic rich kid who was never told no.
   
   u/CriticalIndication80 avatar
   CriticalIndication80
   • In early 2000s when Tesla sales got hot, and he started to manage wackily. He reduced prices right after many of us bought (thanks, Elon!), the mileage claims were proving a hoax, the self-drive wasn't appearing, he backed away from Supercharger installations (none within 30 miles of me), paid himself huge bonuses. When he DOGEd I got rid of my Y.
   
   u/Substantial_Ask_555 avatar
   Substantial_Ask_555
   • When he started giving interviews
   
   u/N91312 avatar
   N91312
   • The downfall began like 20 years ago when he lost all his hair
   
   
   u/dogt0wel avatar
   dogt0wel
   • Couldn't stand him from the first moment I heard of him, around 2014/15 or so.
   
   
   AnteaterSpirited861
   • it wasn’t one moment, people just slowly stopped seeing him as the “real life Tony Stark” guy. The more online and controversial he got, the more public opinion shifted.
   
   
   u/Brilliant-Cabinet-89 avatar
   Brilliant-Cabinet-89
   • He was always an idiot. Anyone talking seriously about colonising mars is an idiot. The moon is right there, and people really underestimate the distance to mars. Any intelligent person would have realised this.
   
   ConfusedMan1987
   • I don’t remember the exact moment for me. But I think for a while he just felt like a rich guy playing with toys that a rich person could. It was definitely around the cave thing that I remember sentiment happening
   
   
   dontmesswithtess
   • I don't know exactly when, but I worked for SpaceX in 2009-2011 and met him a couple times, and while eccentric, he wasn't a walking freak show like now.
   u/shan23 avatar
   shan23
   • Don’t do drugs, kids. Even microdosing can corrupt great minds.
   
   provocative_bear
   • Apart from the Thai cave incident, there was his decision to buy Twitter. Terrible business move, clearly done because he felt like he needed control of a major social media platform to curate his image. Most expensive display of insecurity in modern corporate history.
   
   
   u/feuerpanda avatar
   feuerpanda
   • To some it probably also was the acquisition of Twitter in 2022, cause in some spaces in the world, he could just be avoided in some limited degree. Its also when he openly admitted to vote republican and act more like that and associate positively with Trump. (even if the article i am reading says he has been leaning in that direction since 2017)
   
   u/magpie-lad avatar
   magpie-lad
   • I mean i personally turned when he got angry at the bulletproof glass tesla car not bing bullet proof. I remember it being middle school, was maybe 12 or 13? Like he is rich and from apartheid south africa. Obviously not a likable guy and it was as clear for me then as it is for me now
   
   u/Worduptothebirdup avatar
   Worduptothebirdup
   •When they told him they were releasing the story about him offering a horse for a handjob.
   
   •He was never cool. Bought Tesla and made it seem like he was the genius behind it when he was an investor not an engineer.
   
   I think the worst (besides Dodge and calling Medicare “entitlements”) was he said he would end world hunger if someone told him how to do it with 2B. UNICEF put together a proposal and it was under 2B. Within a week he bought twitter and never made a move to do any good with his money.
   
   
   
   
   eeeee9
   •When his oldest kid came out as transgender. That’s what broke his brain. But he was always a conman with money with half dumb ideas like the hyperloop and robots.
   
   
   u/OmniOwl avatar
   OmniOwl
   •His public downfall started around the time he began airing his thoughts on Twitter.
   
   That might sound like a meme, but it's really not. He was seen as the genius who started Tesla (he didn't), the guy who made PayPal (he didn't) and the guy who invented reusable rockets (he didn't). A sort of "real life Tony Stark" if you will, with none of the charisma, looks, intelligence or even a fraction of the wealth, to back it up. But as soon as he started talking on Twitter, most people understood that he no only didn't know anything, he was and is basically the 2012 internet stereotype "l0lz random meme" guy but with billions of dollars at his disposal.
   
   u/Inner_Alarm_4049 avatar
   Inner_Alarm_4049
   •He could have been a hero, using his money for good like MacKenzie scott, funding science and environmental project. Instead he's an egocentric, insecure, selfish, spoiled brat who ruins the planet. He didn't really fall, he's just never been good, and people started seeing through his bought-for image when he started openly being jealous and people realized he's faking achievements.
   
   LeoLaDawg
   •When he took over Twitter. That's when I remember the majority of people went from slobbing his electric car, SpaceX knob to hating him.
   
   u/Addickt avatar
   Addickt
   •For me it was the boring tunnel and I permanently saw him as an idiot after he announced it
   
   
   HarveySnake
   • Everything that happened with the run up to purchasing twitter and the fallout afterwards showed him to a terrible and dishonest human being and completely incompetent as a leader.
   
   
   
   
   69FireChicken
   •So many things building up to it but the irretrievably breaking point came with the Nazi sig heil to Trump. There's no way back from that for me, I'll never give him or his companies a dime or support him in any way after that.
   
   
   OddRow8843
   •Probably the micro dosing of class A drugs
   
   
   TheSaltyseal90
   •He was never popular or cool to begin with. He’s a daddy’s money kid who needs to pay women to sleep with him. He’s literally the polar opposite of cool lol
   
   The only reason why he is worshiped by so many little boys is because he’s successfully convinced them that if they obtained the same level of wealth he has, they could also pay women to sleep with them lol.
   
   The issue is they will never obtain the same level of wealth because that level of wealth requires fraud and being born into it like having a daddy who owns an emerald mine in South Africa Africa.
   
   u/em5885 avatar
   em5885
   • You were a fool to ever think he was cool. He got rich because he founded a PayPal competitor that got acquired before the dot com bust. He bought his way into other companies.
   
   VibesAreNotGood
   •When he started lying about going to Mars. So 2015-16.
   
   u/MUCKSTERa avatar
   MUCKSTERa
   •For me it was when I entered the self driving vehicle industry and saw how just confidently incorrect he was and made my life harder
   
   mikegalos
   • He's always been a con artist who was successful at taking credit for things that others did and things that never happened but we're always going to happen really soon. His only actual accomplishment has been in self promotion.
   
   u/ProfessionalBench832 avatar
   ProfessionalBench832
   •Ketamine. I have no insight into his drug usage in his early days, but he owns that he abuses ketamine (he takes it himself and WAY to frequently to be therapeutic as he claims) and many board members have said he has a party tray of pills he offers people. He WAS a savvy investor, but not he is just a too big to fail edgelord with a drug problem and, sadly, a platform.
   
   u/hobhamwich avatar
   hobhamwich
   •Born ragingly rich and was taught entitlement. It created him as is. He didn't change. Plenty of good rich people. It's the combination with entitlement that wrecks them.
   
   LokiAstaris
   •When he pushed "Hyper Loop" as the best thing since sliced bread.
   So 2013.
   
   u/tenshiemi avatar
   tenshiemi
   • People keep bring up the Thailand incident but forgetting the part where a scammer emailed him from what was clearly a sketchy email address pretending to be a private investigator and he paid the guy $50k to investigate a man who wrote a critical tweet about him. The scammer fed him lies and they ended up in court for libel because Elon keep tweeting those lies. I assume he won the case because he had way more money to spend but IANAL. I do know that only a fucking moron would send money to a random cold calling stranger pretending to be a PI.
   
   moozootookoo
   •Elon did make fun of a person in school who lost his dad, so the kid pushed him down the stairs and broke his hand and his dad was like he deserved it
   
   u/TypingWhileWiping avatar
   TypingWhileWiping
   •When the love for the environment and electric vehicles stopped being the fad to care about.
   
   
   u/robobav avatar
   robobav
   •How did he ‘save free speech’ with his money?
   
   Please be specific and “buying Twitter” is not an acceptable answer as his being legally forced into buying a company has nothing to do with governmental censorship. If you disagree with that, be specific to how they’re related.
   
   Preferably without any name-calling or insults.
   
   _jamesbaxter
   •When he dropped the ball on the hyperloop contract in California (aka the Boring Company) and then tripled down when I found out it was a strategic move to sabotage high speed rail to sell more cars.
   
   u/TrstnBrtt avatar
   TrstnBrtt
   •I’ve never liked him, and always been grossed out by him. Happy others realize it.
   
   Correct-Resolution-8
   •He was (in my opinion) always putting out insecure loser vibes but it was hard to see because he talked about cool stuff. It's impossible not to see it now. He's what happens when a young person is unattractive and bullied and mad at the world and grows up to be powerful: Impregnating every hot woman he can (they would never touch him under natural circumstances) and doing his best to be the popular kid in his 50s. He's the exact opposite of true manliness or strength, so him babbling about trans people or a lack of masculinity is so ironic (See also: Tucker, Fuentes)
   
   u/Glue_Factory_Maint5 avatar
   Glue_Factory_Maint5
   •Obviously you were a child at the time so I don't expect you to have read this interview with his first ex wife in 2010, but for those of us who did it absolutely sticks with you:
   
   https://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a5380/millionaire-starter-wife/
   
   Also I had friends who worked insane hours at SpaceX circa 2012-14 and heard firsthand about how this dumbass's ego had to be placated in order to get anything done.
   
   Edit: also if you want to go down a rabbit hole about what a huge piece of shit this guy and his family are, Bekah Day has a whole deep dive on YouTube I highly recommend: https://youtu.be/uWNZa--tJmk
   
   u/JefferyTheQuaxly avatar
   JefferyTheQuaxly
   • im going to say 2019 was the start of him hurting his reputation, by 2021 he was fully destroying his own reputation and took on his edgelord meme persona.
   
   other people are saying the thai cave incident, which was from july of 2018, maybe a bit of a better estimate than 2019. once that incident happened there was a slow downfall until like 2021 and he ramped things up further, by 2023-2024 he was fully backing trump and buying twitter to turn it into a conservative echo chamber, etc.
   
   molotovzav
   •The cracks and beginning were the Thai cave bit, the official joke era started when he went MAGA overnight because of sexual assault allegations against him.
   
   
   eekapn
   •These are all great, but don't forget fathering 13 (?) children with multiple women in his mission to help populate the planet. How many does he actually spend time with, never mind be a dad to?
   
   u/GenericUsername19892 avatar
   GenericUsername19892
   •Honestly when he started talking to the public.
   
   the_claus
   •We all should have known since the Mariachi band photo
   
   Huge-Ad7382
   •The second he started getting into politics. He immediately showed the world that just because you are smart in one area, it doesn't make you smart in everything.
   
   Elon is the epitome of political stupidity.
   
   u/Far_Spirit5819 avatar
   Far_Spirit5819
   •The moment he got rich enough and influential enough that he felt comfortable saying his inner thoughts knowing there would be no repercussions
   
   He has a weird pedo family and he tries to fuck and impregnate anything that moves.
   
   Hes always been a freak. It just wasnt on display until around the time around the thai cave. Since then hes just dropped the mask. Hes a fucking idiot who got lucky when hiriny people to manage his companies. Also neuralink head, participating in his breeding fetish is a big reason I see no future for that company
   
   BrewDogDrinker
   • He's always been a cunt.
   
   Tesla was not his company.
   
   He's ruined twitter.
   
   He's clearly a nazi.
   
   moyismoy
   •The moment he Elon tried to do hyperloop he lost me I know enough science to know it would never work the way he said it would
   
   Wisco
   •Elon Musk is a prime example of money and power being very, very bad for a person's mental health. We know he probably does drugs, but the guy is wasted on the smell of his own farts, 24/7. He's completely freakin ' bonkers.
   
   u/YakAcceptable5635 avatar
   YakAcceptable5635
   •When he paid a Chinese kid to boost his Diablo account.
   
   Unforgivable
   
   u/Ramesses901 avatar
   Ramesses901
   •Ketamine, have a bud who went in too deep and Elon shows a lot of the same signs at times. It’s hard to explain to people that haven’t done it and it feels hypocritical but I’m not doing Nazi signs like I figured out the secret to the universe either.
   
   Hypnotist30
   •Exactly what you see now is what he has always been. He is a petulant self-serving man-child.
   
   Impressive_Ad_1675
   •When it became apparent that he steals ideas from others and exploits his workforce.
   
   maliktreal
   •After I heard about the cobalt mine slavery that he laughed off and joked in a meeting
   
   NinJa777777777
   •I never saw him as anything but a nascent megalomaniac. This was years ago when everyone was fawning over him. I refused to buy a Tesla even though I could afford it. For me he always had the ick factor and always looked like a white supremacist.
   
   u/fffan9391 avatar
   fffan9391
   •When he started shilling the hyperloop even though it’s unrealistic. It’s generally accepted he did this so that California wouldn’t build high speed rail.
   
   u/Philodendron69 avatar
   Philodendron69
   •I think it was when he called the deep sea diver a pedo
   
   u/TheFashionColdWars avatar
   TheFashionColdWars
   •When him and about 8 other tech bros went “Dark MAGA” and fell for Curtis Yarvins writings in their desire so topple America as we now know it and have a CEO as a president,with them as our Board of Directors. They no longer feel Democracy is a viable system and have all openly said it in podcasts,books, and interviews.
   
   Funny247365
   •He's gotten grief from people after he switched political ideologies.
   
   Lefties worshipped him as this quirky, misfit, on-the-spectrum, genius, who is bringing amazing things into the world, when he was liberal.
   
   Now he is called a mentally handicapped idiot who was lucky to be born into a family with a little money, and that is the only reason he is the richest man in the world today.
   
   Meanwhile, millions of people have been born into a situation with lot more money and privilege than Elon, and haven't done a darn thing with it. They just spend their massive trust fund partying and don't contribute anything meaningful to society.
   
   Stand_Up_3813
   •He needs to be in the trash bin of history.
   
   Fakegoose1
   • Elons downfall began with the Thai cave incident, but was accelerated when he started spending more time on Twitter.
   
   everill
   •Honestly it was French cosplay thing for me. Bro is just Asmongold with a prep school background.
   
   u/MayorWolf avatar
   MayorWolf
   • For me it was the thai cave situation where he wanted his shitty sub to be used and called the expert diver on the scene a pedofile.
   
   Wat3rM3L0NB3AR
   • I can forgive the Thai incident - what i don't care for was when he bought Twitter and changed it to "X" - nobody calls it that by the way. It's always "X" formerly known as Twitter like it's Prince or something (sorry, The Artist formerly known as Prince). Also, he buddied up with Trump just so he can cut down his taxes and pretend he is actually doing something to help change the world.
   
   
   No-Strawberry-5804
   • My husband says it was when Elon posted himself playing Elden Ring with the worst possible build
   
   
   u/Altruistic-Line-8281 avatar
   Altruistic-Line-8281
   • It was a gradual shift from being seen as an engineer-first builder to a very public, very online personality. The more visible the opinions became, the more they started outweighing the actual engineering achievements in people’s perception.
   
   Basaltcolumn
   • I observed the tides turning on attitudes towards him in leftist and social justice-ey circles in the mid-2010s. I want to say 2016-ish. I think the 2018 cave rescue incident was really where the general public started realizing he was not a cool "real life Tony Stark".
   
   
   

   u/volvavirago avatar
   volvavirago
   •Always. He was always a fraud.
   
   InsideAd732
   • I noticed his "fans" (BOTS) being incredibly toxic and awful around 2016-2017. That's when I started to suspect he was a pos. Boy was I right
   
   
   Born rich
   
   Part of PayPal mafia
   
   Considers self the Genghis Khan of the Valley, impregnating dozens of women
   
   Always overpromised, always underdelivered
   
   High as a kite on ketamine in the oval office with the orange monkey
   
   Is an insufferable boss and burns out all his employees with unethical work-life balance
   
   All of his AI talent left XAI because of his shitty character (losing him billions of $)
   
   Sponsored the republican party to get Trump in office
   
   Former associate of Peter Thiel (just being in the same sentence as Thiel is a red flag imho)
   
   Sued, smeared and suppressed Grimes to keep the baby
   
   Outed by gender disphoric child he had as being a transphobic a-hole
   
   Essentially dupes women to have children with him under NDAs
   
   And for his background:
   
   His pop, Errol, married a woman for 18 years
   
   Proceeded to welcome a step-daughter (4yo)
   
   Proceeded to sexually abuse and have 2 children with said step-daughter (you read that right)
   
   Proceeded to be accused by most (if not all of his spouses and kids of sexual abuse)
   
   Result: Malignant narcissist with high sociopathic tendencies, potentially with a severe personality disorder, erratic and fluid ethos, pattern of lying and dellusions of grandeur, drug addiction and honestly I am genuinely afraid to learn more. Much like Sam Altman, who was accused by his sister of raping her repeatedly over the course of multiple years. Much as any other worthless scum in that same think tank. They are a different breed.
   
   What I would ask myself is: how can we spot this pattern in other people and prevent them from getting hold of power before they succeed?
   
   
   Kdub_54
   • I once heard someone describe him as a guy that is used to having the money and access to having any idea he has come to fruition. He likes to think just because he thinks it can work, it will.
   
   Often his ideas are so outlandish they can’t work in the real world
   
   u/Intrepid_Case1617 avatar
   Intrepid_Case1617
   • I never really liked him tbh. I especially don’t like him since he has Epstein ties.
   
   Sabautil
   • Uh...when his eldest son came out as a trans woman in 2020. Vivian Wilson.
   
   He blamed social media and the left and jump head first into the far right movement.
   
   A year later he left CA for Texas, and bought twitter, which I think he bought because he thought twitter turned his son trans.
   
   u/RetroBerner avatar
   RetroBerner
   • He was always a schyster, but when he got into random twitter fights and then politics, he really fell off
   
   Two-Shots-Of-Vodka
   • Elon has always been the pathetic man child he is
   
   There was just a time when he had a good image due to marketing and presenting himself that way (and I myself believed it too honestly. I thought he was cool)
   
   But Elon musk himself is not very impressive as far as “the first trillionaire” should be? Like the dude is himself a fuckin’ dipshit who doesn’t get along with people, is unlikable, and is so pathetically lonely that he has to pretend to be a DOTA 2 champion to get people to like him but didn’t actually take any time to learn the game before outing himself as just a liar
   
   He’s always been a richboy with a fragile ego that while sure he had some cool ideas is such a cunt about it that no one wants to play with him lol
   Kakamile
   • The world has bans on shite cars like cybertruck, osha's been fighting him for years, tesla is held afloat on now dead carbon offset credits, and musk keeps fighting with his own ai bot.
   
   The stocks in good products are being sold to bail out the bad ones.
   
   Happyinthenaki
   • For me, the Rogan interview that happened before the thai cave incident. The dude was smashed out of his brains and as a result sounded like an absolute douch.
   
   Then the thai cave incident happened and there were no more places to hide his sparkling personality. Should never have fired his HR crew. They would never have allowed the insane chainsaw bollocks.
   
   
   Kansetsupanikku
   • He has never been admirable. The change is more about you, probably. Congratulations on growing up!
   
   u/TinmanOIF avatar
   TinmanOIF
   • Grifters always get found out. Sooner or later people realize snake oil salesmen are selling fake snake oil
   
   u/SmallGreenArmadillo avatar
   SmallGreenArmadillo
   • The interview where I learnt that he was possibly the first man in human history who managed to abandon a wife with young twins AND even younger triplets.
   
   AvidCyclist250
   • When he decided to become his father and make everyone else pay for his pain.
   
   u/kcnole78 avatar
   kcnole78
   • Turns out his Father was even more evil than Elon. I think he started his career trying to be different but we all eventually revert to who we were raised to be.
   
   Zakujanai
   • Never loved a billionaire but I think I first realised he was an idiot when he started pushing for tunnels for individual cars to squeeze down rather than efficient and affordable public transport. The Thai school children thing was a year or two after that I think.
   
   Ol-Bearface
   • The guy’s always been a piece of white supremacist garbage. He comes from a long line of white supremacist garbage people.
   
   TheSquirrelCuisine
   • I have never liked him as a GenXer. NASA is who does space not some foreign millionaire/billionaire dork. The cutting of funding was too much for me. He was never a Tony Stark for me either. (Ironman) he as a dork with a huge round head. It is just another thing where since Ronald Reagan where I thought differently than the masses. Turns out I was right. I didnt want to be this right.
   
   BeefonMars
   • If he supported democrats you would all have tattoos of him. Please, don’t act like the hate is politically driven.
   
   u/asajjventre avatar
   asajjventre
   • Bro named one of his older children Saxon (as in Anglo-Saxon). The signs that he was a racist mouth breather were always there.
   
   Eisernes
   • The Thai cave incident. That’s when he showed the world he was insane and called anyone who didn’t agree with him a pedo, when in fact he was the pedo.
   
   Gaffra
   • I am now 57 years old. He was a joke when he first was on the scene in my hometown called Silicon Valley. I was in the business for many years. And what disgusted me was how people thought he was a genius. He’s never been a genius, you would be amazed at the engineers behind the scenes in these companies, they don’t seem to get enough credit.
   
   
   u/Drew_of_all_trades avatar
   Drew_of_all_trades
   • The Hyperloop and the Boring Project were the kickers for me. We were going to get an underground hi speed rail and the duty from the tunnels would be turned into bricks for affordable housing. Then it was going to be a shuttle system for your car, then it was just a one lane tunnel. Then it was, “look at my cool flamethrower!”
   
   He boasted about tech that was going to improve lives, then when he didn’t produce anything people started to bug him about it online, and he started responding with juvenile insults. Eventually that became his primary shtick.
   
   That’s how I remember it
   
   
   u/KeaboUltra avatar
   KeaboUltra
   • When he first came about and became popular imo. He was always pretentious af and only said things that people who didn't know any better would praise or would promise the impossible or at least extremely difficult futures with no real plan to get there. His word were empty and he was only trying to sound smart. He's an entrepreneur more than anything. But I know you mean the real downfall. I believe it happened sometime after Trump's initial presidency. 2017 or 2018 I believe. Cracks started to show with how he treated his workers.
   
   He is definitely in a down fall. At least a mental one. Current Elon is very different from 2013 Elon though they were the same, he was just a putting on a front so that people would trust him and give him money so he didn't have to fake it anymore, which worked
   
   u/brufleth avatar
   brufleth
   • For me: When they took a Lotus Elise and destroyed it by adding tons of weight and charging stupid money for it.
   
   Real answer: He started out as shit and has continued to always be shit.
   
   Pnut0027
   • Prob when he was born to a family who enriched themselves on the backs of Black Africans during the apartheid era.
   
   
   

   u/tomas_shugar avatar
   tomas_shugar
   • June 2001, when Thiel and the rest of the PayPal people (rightfully) told him that "X.com" is a stupid fucking name and that "PayPal" is a much better name for a website that is about making payments simpler for people.
   
   Then he bided his time until he cracked because a random rescue diver had the audacity to explain how a hard body sub wouldn't be able to enter the caves to rescue some kids. That's when most people saw him fall.
   
   But the man has never been well. He's always been this level of shithead.
   
   
   Shanloulie
   • birth, born into a south african white supremest blood emerald dynasty, bros had no hope of developing actual empathy for others and no one to tell him no his whole life
   
   
   SpicyCommenter
   • he was always a cunt
   
   jbbhengry
   • I started to see through him the second time he was on the joe Rogan pod cast. The first time he was on it I thought he's disturbed and the second time I thought he's a liar, never thought he was a genius. He totally sucks and Rogan too.
   
   HeNegativePhoenix
   • Publicly, his downfall began when he called the cave diver a pedo.
   
   Privately, he has always been a degenerate with a ton of money so his Public Relations team has been managing him well. I think when it was revealed that Trump can do and say anything and get away with it, that Elon realized he doesn't have to mask his true thoughts.
   
   There are no repercussions. Tesla stock just keeps going up. His other companies are doing great.
   
   He just gets richer and richer.
   
   There are zero consequences to him and his ilk even if the worst is revealed about them. For example, MAGAts don't care Trump is a pedo
   
   man0man
   • The more he spoke, the more his hypocrisy became obvious and bottomless.
   
   u/Huh-what-2025 avatar
   Huh-what-2025
   • Elon Musk never invented a damn thing. He is a rich kid that bought companies that invented cool things. That’s all. Just a rich kid. Sounds smart until you hear him explain things that you know a lot about and you realize how surface level his understanding is.
   
   u/Logandh3 avatar
   Logandh3
   • He has never invented a single thing in his life. He has no talent whatsoever. He just used his daddy’s slave money to buy other people’s inventions and slap his name on them.
   
   
   u/Daomsoul avatar
   Daomsoul
   • Idk but I knew there was a reason to dislike the guy. Gotta dislike the person who uses daddies & mommies money cause they act like a brat lol
   
   
   originalmango
   • When? It might’ve been the moment he and trump started sixty nine-ing each other. Turns out the Venn diagram of those who want electric vehicles and those who want trump to be their god king for life are two circles about a mile apart.
   
   
   u/Ok-Paramedic8 avatar
   Ok-Paramedic8
   • For me, it was when he smashed the window to the cyber truck on stage. I realized in that moment that he was not a genius and was, in fact, a total fake.
   
   It got really bad, though, when he went full maga. That’s when it was really confirmed that he was a POS and not just a phony
   
   
   u/SavageDruidz avatar
   SavageDruidz
   • Obviously when he bought X. He was a hero to the left until then. Downfall only in the eyes of liberals.
   
   Off topic, isnt Mangione handsome.
   
   
   Odd-Cake-5439 avatar
   Odd-Cake-5439
   •Probably a couple hundred years ago or so when his family pressed the locals into slavery in their emerald mines, OP.
   
   What I mean is...Media made him what you thought he was. Media thought he was far left guy so they loved him. Now media thinks he's far right so they hate him. In reality, I don't think he cares at all. I also don't think he is left or right, he is very much a realist, or as real as he thinks in that brain of his. Regardless, it depends on where you get your info, like everything else
   
   
   u/bigpaparod avatar
   bigpaparod
   • He ain't my daddy. He is just a really rich toddler that desperately craves love, respect, admiration, and a legacy to fill that gaping hole where his heart and sould should be, but will never get it. He just has lackies, yes men, and whores around him. No one gives a shit about him that isn't getting paid to or who isn't a bootlicker that desperately wants to get paid by him.