None of those good things magically disappear if Elon fails in his Twitter purchase or changes. Those past gains have already happened.
If your argument was forward looking it would make more sense to me (if he fails with this Twitter program, he won’t be able to deliver Starship which would be bad because XYZ; or it would impact his ability to continue Tesla forward because ABC). I don’t know that I agree with the forward looking argument, but it seems more sound to me than the backward looking argument.
I actually suspect that many people hate him not in spite of what he has done, but because of it:
They think if they acknowledge what people like Elon Musk have done in their lives, they'd have to loathe themselves, their own choices, values and weaknesses.
Which is, of course, quite silly. Each human being has their own path in life. Comparing yourself to anyone, no matter who, is going to cause misery. But with people like Elon, the threat to the ego is particularly great.
So, hate and schadenfreude are the easy way out. "He, too, makes mistakes. So I'm not that worthless after all".
(The irony being that many of these people say that Elon Musk is self-centered. Though the question he is asking is "What do I believe is greatest good to humanity as a species", whereas they, by their very act of comparing themselves to him, are asking "How can I be greater than and more right than Elon Musk".)
(By the way, I don't actually agree with any of what I wrote above. It's just another example of a bad-faith argument like the one I'm responding to.)
Note: None of these things, as described, are things he actually did.
The disabled person was not sneered at. There was a misunderstanding of employment status and it was resolved and apologized for.
No lies were spread about a victim. He replied to a tweet that was spreading such lies, not spreading it himself.
The person who got called "pedo guy" was not in "mild disagreement". He was not called as such for disagreeing with Elon. (This is the most common mistake about this event that people repeat. Elon encourages disagreement against himself.) He was called as such for pushing similarly rude insults against Elon (calling for the sodomizing of Elon) and Elon responded in turn.
Before, almost all the techies here were dreaming and begging to work for Elon Musk. Then the blue bird happened, got bought out and gave them 'emotional distress' and Elon immediately became public enemy number 1.
> So, hate and schadenfreude are the easy way out. "He, too, makes mistakes. So I'm not that worthless after all".
Hence that, the same techies who loved him are now eternally desperate for Twitter to be Elon's biggest failure as much as possible, giving 24/7 over-coverage about Twitter schadenfreude.
The manipulation of human psychology due to over-coverage and creating villains every month or year is just too easy to create a story out of that is guaranteed to attract eyeballs and clicks. It is an symptom of obsession.
He upset and tore down the military-industrial complex launch monopoly saving the collective US tax payers billions through starting SpaceX (and could soon revolutionize access to space for the average person within the next decade). (Also note that without SpaceX, we'd still be paying money to Russia to send US astronauts to space, which wouldn't be a good look during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.)
He created an electrical vehicle revolution that's taking the world by storm, changing industries and pushing us much faster toward ending global warming than would have happened without. It's hard to imagine a few misguided political opinions could offset all of that. Let's be realistic here.
(Yes you can't attribute all that to him solely, as Elon himself says commonly, the praise should be given to the workers at SpaceX and Tesla, not him. But at the same time, without him, they would have never happened.)