Musk has a long history of attacking journalists who write stories critical about him or his company, and he famously called a guy who helped save a bunch of kids a pedophile for criticizing his ill-advised efforts to help out. When he was a kid, he was pushed down a flight of stairs for making fun of a fellow student's father's suicide, and Musk's father was not on his son's side.

This is not new behavior.

If you are anything like me, you were fooled for a long time because of SpaceX.

It's become clearer and clearer however that SpaceX succeeded in spite of Elon, not because of him. There are all sorts of reports around now that SpaceX management is very effective at building a firewall around Elon to stop him doing a lot of damage.

But his politics, narcissism, deception, misrepresentation and incompetence actually aren't new. Lying about his education, his role in Paypal, founding tesla and so on. It goes back decades.

Personally I'm not surprised at Elon's temper tantrum and banning people who are mean to him on Twitter. What saddens me however is how many stans and apologists ("dick riders" if you will) Elon still has. Elon does not care about you. You will never be Elon. For the record, this is a general "you", not who I'm replying to specifically.

> revealing his true self

He seems to try very hard to show who he is, some people just won’t take him at is word / actions.

> in the midst of some life crisis?

A significant fraction of our ascendant elite are overworked, overmedicated and alone. Musk is likely the most critical of the afflicted by Kayne syndrome.

It's a pretty obvious midlife crisis. Dude's baby mama left him for a trans woman. His own gender-reaffirming hair implants turned out all wrong. Tough time to be Elon.

power corrupts

He got mad at people tracking (or trying to track) current IRL location to enable harassment after someone went after his son.

“He’s in a downward spiral that’s rapidly gaining speed.”

Yeah, he owns the worlds largest auto company, largest rocket company, and just threw down $40 billion to buy the worlds biggest social media company.

Dude is in dire straights indeed.