Yeah, he cycled through spouses, smoked pot live on a podcast and had a sometimes ... reckless attitude, but constantly delivered in exchange - without Musk, we'd still be stuck getting fleeced by ULA/EADS, ICE car manufacturers bribing politicians to soften emissions regulations and satellite internet being GEO only.
"Old Musk" was a bit much at times, but acceptable in exchange for how society profited from his unwillingness to accept a "no". "New Musk" has that same unwillingness but is willing to destroy democracy itself, and that makes him orders of magnitude more dangerous.
Musk didn't learn from getting sued, nor from the permanent harm to Musk's reputation, possibly because people kept acting like it was a small price to pay for the EV transition.
Now he supports a president who doesn't care about EVs, who dislikes renewables, who is restricting market access to the biggest and cheapest EV manufacturers.
And, while I like space tech, to be blunt, Musk's reputation is now so low that I will not only not buy Starlink hardware, but also want to make sure I don't accidentally pay a Musk tax in the form of buying goods or services that paid extra to interoperate with anything Musk owns.
The salute made people care because it was completely and utterly undeniable evidence. Of course, people still try to excuse even that, but a lot of the Musk apologists got pretty silent after it.