Of course, in reality, he's looked like a bitch since at least 2018.
Is he though?
Plenty of people start out smart and then melt their brains in one way or another. Musk really seems like he's going down the same road.
Smarts aren't a permanent state of being, they're a temporary blessing, and if you're lucky they're slowly replaced with wisdom as you age. Musk doesn't seem to be getting the late-life migration to wisdom. Wise elders generally focus on a legacy that benefits their community, they don't spout slurs and pay people to make them look like they're good at video games.
Differentiating between 5d chess and delusional behavior is not easy. I'm personally inclined to think its the latter, but there's admittedly room for debate.
The reason I think this is because it is failure mode that is not uncommon in highly driven, egocentric geniuses. Especially one individual who has stated on record that they are taking ketamine, a powerful dissociative drug.
what do you think is the potential win for him?
It's hard to put a price on the power to fire people investigating your company for wrongdoing.
Or the power to blow up starships even though you were told by the government you can't launch more because you blew up the last one, raining down debris on everyone and causing their flights to be grounded.
Wouldn't you love to be able to do that without any repercussions?
Or to test your driverless car tech on public roads and not get in trouble no matter how many people they kill.
Or to sell your unsold vehicle inventory, that's building up because your product is a boondoggle, directly to the government.
Or the power to bully foreign governments into using your product with the full backing of the United States military.
Or to award yourself and your companies government contracts worth billions of dollars without having to bid or compete over them.
Or to train your fledgling AI on all the information you're scraping about Americans from government data sources unavailable to your competitors.
Or to cancel government projects that benefit your competitors, like killing investments in EV charging infrastructure, forcing everyone to use the one you own.
Or to test your brain implant on human subjects without the pesky FDA up your ass making sure it's done "humanely".
On and on and on. The corruption is just endless if you're creative enough...
They are related but distinct.