It’s interesting watching the popular consensus narrative shift to whatever confirms most people’s existing priors, independent of factual accuracy (eg: the emerald mine stuff that now gains an outsized prominence in his story).
What’s happened to Musk is not unique and not not especially mysterious. Musk made his fortune making bold, asymmetric and correct bets. He was both smart and incredibly perceptive of the world in a way that allowed him to make inferences several steps ahead of other people and then had the personality and corporate resources to bet big on where the world was headed. It’s a difficult thing to do because you have to have courage in your convictions and any move you make, you will have very smart, very thoughtful people give a convincing laying out of conventional wisdom as to why your asymmetric bet will probably not pay out. Your entire life is the entire world telling you everything you’re doing is incorrect so you learn to trust nobody but your own gut instincts and the infrastructure of independent minded people you trust to refine those gut instincts.
However, the problem with this kind of investing strategy is that you need all 3 of the characteristics to apply to continue making money. And what almost inevitably happens as you get richer is that you stay the same level of smart but you start losing touch with the perceptiveness that made you the money in the first place. The money insulates you from the outside world and gives you a false perception on the lives of everyday people and slowly, your inner circle of people you trust to bounce ideas off of gets replaced from the original independent thinkers into a coterie of yes people and functionaries who have no incentive to ever push back against you.
Look at Mark Zuckerberg, everyone was convinced that his acquisition of Instagram for $1B and WhatsApp for $22B were crazy overpaying and a total waste of money. No normal CEO could have pushed that through because any “rational” analysis of the situation could have never justified those moves. But he had the courage of his convictions over where the future of social was headed and he had the corporate structure to allow him to make those moves. Fast forward a decade later and he’s doing the same thing with the metaverse, his courage in his convictions are making him see a path there that nobody else is seeing except now he’s wrong and because he’s become high off his own supply and his reasoning process has been hijacked by a small group of insiders who are off in crazy land.
You saw the same thing with Steve Jobs, twice. By the end of his first tenure at Apple, he was off into wacky land making products that appealed to him but wasn’t what Apple needed at the time, he went off into the wilderness for a bit and went even more crazy with NeXT computers, obsessing about stuff like the factory the computers being made in being spotless and it was only the failure at NeXT that made him reflect and come back to Apple a second time with renewed correct judgement. But towards the end of his tenure at Apple, you could see the same reality distortion field working on himself again and Apple living with the legacy of a few of his bad decisions (like the ultra-thin, USB-C only macbooks or the trash can mac pro) for a decade before it managed to correct itself.
You saw the same things from the likes of Howard Hughes and a bunch of other historical business figures that I can’t name off the top of my head, it’s a occupational hazard for any business person who makes their fortune on bold, asymmetric and correct bets.