What reality do you exist in where Zuckerberg, Cook and Gates have rehabilitated their public image? At least Zuckerberg and Cook are currently seen as Trump sycophants and are personally despised for it.
Elon is not just a PR department away from being seen as an acceptable person. He did a Nazi salute for the world to see and most of the world finds him contemptible.
Also the only way manual driving diminishes is if the world invests more into public transportation.
I think you underestimate how quickly public sentiment can change. Just a few years ago there was public outcry, protests, etc for anything Musk related.
Now there is none of that, not many people talking about him in a political light and I'm certain public sentiment about him has gone up given it is now already more publicly acceptable to talk about things adjacent to him and his companies.
There will be die hards who will never change, but its clearly apparent on social media he is no longer getting anywhere near the hate he used to, and even people who previously weren't are now publicly praising things like Grok and recent SpaceX missions.
Every day I see contempt for the acts he committed through "Doge". The man is irredeemable. It's not like he personally does any work anyway. Any kind of accomplishment that happens at SpaceX or other companies is from hard working intelligent employees.
If not for the uncertainty around the extremely inflated Tesla stock price due to the lies he has told he would have been ousted years ago. He has no tangible vision of the future and no expertise in anything.
Elon is not just a PR department away from being seen as an acceptable person. He did a Nazi salute for the world to see and most of the world finds him contemptible.
Also the only way manual driving diminishes is if the world invests more into public transportation.