Wow, that’s a wild misstatement; that is exactly groupthink nonsense.
You (people) loved him before he went in for Trump.
The inflection point for the public was Musk calling the cave diver, who helped orchestrate the rescue of a dozen trapped kids, a "pedo guy" and then doubling down on it, again, twice in front of his audience of millions.
The inflection point for anyone in tech with two eyes and a brain was Musk insisting his companies produce products that do more than they are, still to this day, capable of.
First was around 2018, the latter was ~2016, although anyone who was familiar with machine learning knew models were not as capable as Musk was insisting they were, and that the hyperloop was a scam.
Oh, and when he lied about taking Tesla private so he could quickly boost the price of the stock. That sucks too. He's always sucked.