as an amateur Musk-mythologist, I would guess something we can't see is going on behind the scenes. Since around the time he started dating Grimes, Elon's general tone has gotten more combative. Whether he's deliberately courting bad press or it's a byproduct of something else isn't clear to me, but I would hazard a guess that it's part of something larger.

Part of why I find the Elon Musk story so fascinating is because we're seeing in real time how the 'great man' and 'great forces' narratives of history can both be applied as filters to understand what's going on. I would think the flood of bad press is better explained by the 'great forces' filter, but I don't understand that filter intuitively enough to usefully speculate what's changed.