He got high on his own supply. The man created quite the aura by leveraging his less-than-glorious Paypal past, his taking over of Tesla and actually doing some interesting things with SpaceX. His companies achieved some genuinely impressive feats which he gladly attributed to himself and probably confined himself to his perceived genius and infallibility.

Hopefully, Twitter will be a teaching moment for him but so far he seems to just double down on his mistakes.

He's held on a leash alright.

I doubt that's true, or he wouldnt have managed to take Tesla from a prototype and a few million dollars to billions, and then again with a rocketship contractor from scratch.

It's possible for people to be evil/immoral and also good at what they do, I don't get what the obsession with painting him as a dip shit who managed to accidentally make multiple successful global enterprises.

If it was really that easy to fail upward when managing these businesses you'd see a lot more of them.