If you're going to quote, at least quote correctly. "pedo guy" was the insult.

He also hired a private investigator to target the guy. I'm a huge fan of his work with SpaceX but let's not downplay what a petty asshole he was during that whole thing.

Absolutely. It is worth noting that Tesla was experiencing "production hell" at the time, so obviously Musk was under a ton of stress. That doesn't excuse the behavior, but does make it easier to understand. Frankly, Musk should have kept out of the whole thing, but staying silent isn't the style that anyone operating at that level is going to have.

Asking his team to build a sub is inexcusable. Still love his product, despite the distraction.

> Asking his team to build a sub is inexcusable

Is that what actually happened? Version I heard is that his engineers came up with the sub idea themselves, the idea didn't actually come from Musk. He just told them they could work on this and use corporate resources/funds to do so.

The sub didn't end up being used in the rescue. But, were the rescuers to any significant degree hindered by SpaceX/Boring/Tesla's offer of help? In a scenario like that, it makes sense to explore different solution options in parallel – the fact that some of them end up being culled doesn't mean it was wrong to explore them to begin with. Musk released an email exchange with the (co-)head of the cave rescue diving team [0], in which he asks if he should stop work on the sub and is told to continue with it. A lot of people paint it as if Musk and his team were hanging around the rescue site doing nothing but annoying the rescuers and getting in their way – but you'd think if that was actually true, they would have told him to abandon the submarine project not continue work on it.

[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1016684366083190785

It's probably for the best that billionaires draw the line at Twitter rants, rather than... other things that money could buy.

He's just a very rich nerd.