I think he fired his PR team because the image they had built up for him had gone to his head. Then there was the financial success that came with it. He probably believed that he really is a genius who is not dependent on anyone but himself - he is obviously still convinced of this abstruse idea. Yet it has always been the case that Musk was the biggest problem for his companies. It really is a PR masterstroke to hide the fact that he is actually rather incompetent for so long. This man lives exclusively from the achievements of others. This is proven by the fact that he reached a settlement with the actual founders of Tesla to allow him to call himself a Tesla co-founder - which he is not. In my eyes, Musk is the personification of the most fundamental problem that our society has: He merely takes credit for the hard work and remarkable expertise of his employees in order to present all of this to the public as the achievement of a supposedly exceptional person. This is how people like Musk and Trump, for example, see themselves. However, their miserable decisions show that they are nothing of the sort. Hubris is the term psychology uses for such inaccurate overestimation of oneself.