Man even got an Iron Man 2 cameo as himself, and had scenes (of the bad guys factory lmao) filmed in a SpaceX factory

Well, he used to have a really good PR team, along with teams at Tesla and SpaceX to prevent him from breaking anything important.

Then he fired the PR team and took direct control of a company that didn't have a team of handlers.

We're now seeing the real Musk instead of Musk filtered through teams of competent people.

All he had to do was sit in his money bunker and make dumb tweets about harmless things and he'd have eventually died a legendary figure.

Now he's infamous for a totally different reason. I mean look at Richard Branson. That could be Elon right now, as the worst case scenario. Some hyper-rich dude that most people are aware of but that you never hear much negative on in the media. He just kinda exists, does billionaire stuff. Heck, even Bezos right now. When's the last time you saw Bezos show up negatively in the news? And neither of them had a full on cult of personality forming around them.

he had every single one of us believing he was real life Tony Stark

Who is us?

Watching this man’s trainwreck is so mind boggling. I mean just a decade ago he had every single one of us believing he was real life Tony Stark. I mean even pop culture sci fi like Star Trek mentioned him along Sagen and Einstein… He really pulled the wool over our eyes.

Hey, not every one of us. I disliked Elon Musk before it was cool. I thought he was always obviously just another obscenely wealthy self-centered guy with good PR.

His hype was otherworldly. I honestly think it outstripped his own efforts and became a cultural thing, probably affected his own self-perception to no small degree... Now here we are.