A lot of people, including me, realized even as early as circa 2018 that he was a nutcase. Imo the point of post hoc ergo should've been when he said zero Covid case by April (2020).

Sure but the authoritarianism outcome was not predestined by simply funding the technologies he invested in. Plenty of eccentric and/or drug-addled billionaires went on to live relatively harmless lives. He could have been a jar-pissing recluse or spent his days pinning the weasel in a Caribbean polycule dormitory or gone on wild John McAfee adventures.

The place we went wrong wasn't incentivizing Tesla, it was allowing the other guy to escape conviction.