He was never really liberal, but he had a nasty divorce and went mask off because of it. Same thing happened to Scott Adams. Adams was never really pro worker. He just repeated the stories people would send him and kept doing it because he liked the attention, causing a feedback loop. Musk had that going with the EVs and Mars mission talks. But he kept getting criticism over dates being missed and the divorce cracked him. He then started seeking approval from a less scrupulous group.
He gathered the wealth and realized his life is empty and people still cringed when he walked in a room and left in disgust when he spoke. In general, folks on the left, who were more associated with tech until recently, are typically more educated and don't blindly cheer at catch phrases and bumper stickers without any depth in their support - The right wing does.
elon wants friends and a dad who will love him, the right wing will pretend as long as the money flows.
He's really just that brain damaged. A couple of weeks ago I read a book about his takeover of Twitter and even his day-to-day behaviors are completely unhinged. He is surrounded by sycophants and weirdos and has lost touch with reality years ago.
Corporations are often the most authoritarian structures on the earth. We just tolerate them for dumb reasons (being told there's no alternative to capitalism).
According to his biographer, Walter Isaacson, around this period Musk began sending “rightwing memes and conspiracy theories” to Grimes, who replied: “Is this from 4chan or something? You’re actually starting to sound like someone from the far right.”
At the same time, his daughter Vivian came out as transgender and changed her name, declaring that she no longer wanted to “be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form”.
Musk himself has cited Vivian as a reason for his political shift, telling the pop psychologist Jordan Peterson that he had “lost [his] son [sic], essentially”, and concluding that his son “is dead, killed by the woke mind virus”.