I hated Elon Musk long before it was cool: I was a fan of Tesla in the early days, and when I read Musk's "super-secret master plan" for Tesla I thought "yeesh, the board chairman is an idiot, where did they find this bozo?" (I knew a bit about SpaceX but somehow didn't make the connection.)

That said, I was surprised to learn much later that, by all accounts, Elon Musk was a competent and resourceful leader in SpaceX's early days. Maybe these stories are just his personality cult in action, but I found it plausible. It appears he once knew his place as an engineering manager, without LARPing as a Chief Engineer (he didn't appoint himself to CTO until quite a bit later). I worked for a really good manager who didn't know how to code, but he knew a lot about software and was very good about pulling back on coding things vs pushing forward on software design. It seemed like Musk was similar at SpaceX.

Which is all to say that celebrity is a helluva drug. I don't think Musk was ever an especially "high-IQ individual," and his first marriage suggests he's always been a misogynistic loser. But being anointed "a real life Tony Stark!" seems to have destroyed his brain. Ketamine probably doesn't help.