Why couldn’t he be? There is ample evidence that, yes, he is this dumb and he’d had less press/more handling before. Remember, there was a different story about him. News outlets love their stories. The story was Musk = quiet, nerdy genius billionaire that was gonna save the world and Zuckerberg and Bezos were the quintessential villains in the press. Now that Zuckerberg rebranded with “Meta” and 2016 is in the distant past now, we hear much less about him and Bezos got a huge sympathy injection by getting divorced (and, I’m not even sure I’m remembering this properly, but the last thing I heard about him was his divorce and his ex wife getting half of everything).
Around this time, the pandemic hit and musk became the richest man alive, the really dumb shit he was saying and doing was more visible (and embraced by the right) and boom. All credibility was gone, all the stories from Paypal and SpaceX about his childishness and need to be corralled became common knowledge, and his story changed. The media had a new story, a new target, and it was a profitable one. Put the microscope on him and he kept fucking up. Then he kept doing douchey shit, bought twitter, and from there the dumpster fire of this really public failing became the flash point to display his stupidity.
My point is, he’s always been his dumb, given all the current evidence. It just wasn’t the story for a while. Now it is. So it seems like a new quality.