That's diminished wealth. Wealth is factored into success, but is not the only unit of it. One can see diminished wealth at the same time as realizing gains elsewhere to no net change or even net gain.

Again, not that he won't be fantastically wealthy or successful. But he will probably take a nasty hit to both his wealth and his reputation because of Twitter.

I don't feel that the reason he's been in the public mind is positive. Most of the news for Elon this year has been: "billionaire tries to back out of ill advised takeover event", "billionaire loses lawsuit", "speed run to twitter's destruction", "advertisers pause relationship with Twitter", "fires half of twitter workforce, then asks some of those people to come back to work", "loyalty oath leaves some twitter teams with 0 or 1 employees", "locks doors of Twitter until Monday following, changes mind and asks all twitter employees to race in Friday night"

Taking the sink into Twitter was lighthearted and fun. Everything since then was a disaster. It hasn't made Musk look like a good leader. Literally doing nothing would have been a better plan, and he still could have made news whenever he wanted by doing anything - after he knew what he wanted to do.

Yes, exactly. Given his increasing success elsewhere, it is suggested he would have to fall below billionaire status for the net change to run negative. The other commenter was quite clear that a a million dollar loss wouldn't see a net decline in his success, even though a million dollar loss would unquestionably be a decline in wealth.

> I don't feel that the reason he's been in the public mind is positive.

We're talking about success, though, not positive qualities. Often the people with the most positive qualities aren't even considered successful at all. They are very much unrelated.