In the past (early Tesla - SpaceX - Boring Company - Hyperloop - crypto) he seemed apolitical and only to really care about setting up the building blocks for a new, different society on Mars. Maybe a pipe dream, maybe megalomaniac, but just very cool and very futuristic. He didn't seem very political aside from a libertarian bent.

Somewhere along the road he devolved into a petty and weird character, and then went off the deep end into full spectrum alt-right weirdness.

He is the same type of talented hype man as Jobs was, with the same sort of reality distortion field. Otherwise SpaceX reusable wouldn't have happened. And even Jensen Huang was supremely impressed how fast xAI built up data centers.