At that point he’d outed himself as an asshole to the general public, but he still got big results with SpaceX and Tesla. That incident could have been lost to time and a legacy of undeniable successes.

Hyperloop is where things went cuckoo-bananas business-wise IMO. The delays and broken promises at Tesla were weird, but anyone who’d heard of subways could tell the whole hyperloop thing was doomed to fail, and it became increasingly obvious to anyone who read tech headlines that he wasn’t just any asshole, but a clueless asshole.