> You (people) loved him before he went in for Trump.
The inflection point for the public was Musk calling the cave diver, who helped orchestrate the rescue of a dozen trapped kids, a "pedo guy" and then doubling down on it, again, twice in front of his audience of millions.
The inflection point for anyone in tech with two eyes and a brain was Musk insisting his companies produce products that do more than they are, still to this day, capable of.
First was around 2018, the latter was ~2016, although anyone who was familiar with machine learning knew models were not as capable as Musk was insisting they were, and that the hyperloop was a scam.