Still waiting for Teslas driving from west to east coast completely autonomously. And Elon flying to mars.

Financial suicide?

Uh, the first one. It's all downhill after that. It's the only one he's ever pulled off. Look at the goals for the master plan part 2 and you'll see that they haven't managed to do a single one, but Elon still went ahead a published a part 3. Why actually meet goals when you can just pretend you've met them by posting new ones, I guess.

Weren't all his companies successful in the end?

Some people are suggesting he ran up so much debt buying Twitter that he's now running it into the ground in order to declare bankruptcy and not have to repay the debt. I don't know how plausible this is.

Exactly!

More are more I've been thinking - he watches anime, he thinks current social media is incredibly dangerous, and (while he was always a dick in private) he only really showed the current Musk after meeting Trump.

We know musk watches anime - it's like the zero requiem. First, he becomes a folk hero, a billionaire putting his weight behind important tech for humanity. Then he meets Trump - maybe he realized how dark our prognosis as a species is.

He starts driving away his left-leaning futurist and techy core with bigotry and being a dick. He backs out of a plan to buy Twitter, violates his parole, and makes a big show about trying to get out of it... But what did he actually do besides complain it's full of bots, then give up?

He walks in with a kitchen sink, drives away anyone who can afford to leave or might resist a stupid order, and settles in.

For months, about every two weeks he's been doing something to wean users off Twitter, while making a big show of some increasingly obviously dumb ideas. Like seriously, his business is ads - it makes so little sense that he limit users to such low limits - even subscribers could eat through that easily

He lies through his teeth and says it's working, he's almost breaking even, that users and advertisers come crawling back... Exactly what u/spez and every other social media guy desperately want to believe - the only thing standing between them and profit is telling their users to suck it

Now he finally admits they're in terrible shape, making his last fanboys look like idiots, and making himself look not only erratic and out of touch, but like a bad businessman.

To totally parallel the requiem, he needs to topple all the billionaires before staging his death - leaving the world in shape to rebuild, and very wary of the dangers of wealth inequality.

Or at least make us actually unite and change the laws and economic system.

Or maybe he's just having a midlife crisis, hates Twitter, and is just burning money for the hell of it. And the attention.