I think he always believed his own hype. Heck there was a point where I was somewhat into his hype.

Though I never liked Tesla's interior design philosophy of "just put all the controls on a giant tablet and call it a day"

Truth is we didn't know enough about him to gain an opinion. So imaginations ran wild. I mean there are people who have been saying how bad he was since the whole PayPal thing. It's just those companies weren't big enough at the time for it to gain any gravity in the public eye.

Then Tesla and spaceX happened, and people thought what he was doing was awesome, because a lot of it was and it was easy to look past the parts that weren't.

Now however the fact he can't keep his mouth shut and has become a twitter addict has kinda ruined our public opinion on him. If he had just stayed quiet and not bothered with the whole buying twitter thing, people might not care much about him. And the Epstein stuff and affairs and shit didn't help him one bit. He's right to mistrust the media - that shit is like a gourmet breakfast for them.

Basically he revealed himself in the public for what he truly is. A cold blooded greedy ass tycoon with an ego the size of the planets he's trying to colonise, with a modern style nerd-hipster science theming and old school conservative ideals.