His PR downfall was super preventable. Ironman is fictional and unrealistically competent, and nobody expects no failures. A good portion of the tests on YouTube were designed to be impossible to fail (such as the ones where a mannequin gets shot out .25s from a model y doing 30), draw attention to those and make people associate “Tesla assisted breaking test” with “impossible to pass clickbait” and the problem is minimized. With starship exploding, space travel is hard and starship is ambitious. Spinning a series of failed tests into proof that the project is ambitious is a very easy thing to do; every space project has failed a lot before succeeding, so just draw attention to that. He could absolutely maintain his image to most people and rebrand his failings as progress — “Elon time” has been a thing for at least a decade. His downfall wasn’t inevitable, people just stopped looking past his issues when he bought Twitter and supported DeSantis.
His PR downfall was super preventable. Ironman is fictional and unrealistically competent, and nobody expects no failures. A good portion of the tests on YouTube were designed to be impossible to fail (such as the ones where a mannequin gets shot out .25s from a model y doing 30), draw attention to those and make people associate “Tesla assisted breaking test” with “impossible to pass clickbait” and the problem is minimized. With starship exploding, space travel is hard and starship is ambitious. Spinning a series of failed tests into proof that the project is ambitious is a very easy thing to do; every space project has failed a lot before succeeding, so just draw attention to that. He could absolutely maintain his image to most people and rebrand his failings as progress — “Elon time” has been a thing for at least a decade. His downfall wasn’t inevitable, people just stopped looking past his issues when he bought Twitter and supported DeSantis.