The Cybertruck announcement was a couple years after the Thai Rescue Divers "pedo" incident, which was the tipping point for many people (including on the left) to realize he wasn't actually the Tony Stark character he pretended to be and actually a pretty shitty person.

This was well into the Tesla flamethrower/short shorts/funding secured/etc period of Tesla meme stockification. And pushing Dogecoin/crypto.

He certainly definitely wasn't the "darling of the left" by then. But you are correct that his image was significantly less tarnished by political meddling and later obsession with "woke/trans/culture war of the day stuff.

He was* the darling of the emerging meme stock day trader/gambler/WSB crowd which in broad strokes tends to anti-correlate with the "left".