I think he's just finally being honest. Also being a car company CEO. I've never thought that he was a liberal, he's just making a buck trying to change car manufacturing (and batteries). It'd be like thinking Henry Ford was a liberal because he was making cars cheap and wanted to help the "little guy". No, he just figured out there's only so many millionaires to profit from, so he needed to expand business horizons. The Tesla-is-going-to-save-the-world nonsense has been out of control for a while now. Maybe some of the engineers at Tesla have different political leanings, but honestly who cares? Just churn out those cars and get gas guzzlers off the road!
Disclosure: I own a fair amount of Tesla stock.
Musk spent years being a conservative boogeyman for wanting to build electric cars. Now he's the keeper of the faith. Twitter and Tesla stock are a mess right now because of this noise that has nothing to do with the performance of either company.
Many people think Musk started Tesla, and that's not true. He was an early venture capitalist who put money into the company in exchange for equity. Since then, his primary business talent has been convincing other people to invest in very expensive and unprofitable companies. The engineering, the aesthetic design, the financial planning, and probably the strategy has all been done by other people working at Tesla. Musk's role has been to go out, get attention, and raise money - and he's done a phenomenal job of that considering Tesla's valuation vs. the entire world's auto industry. Maintaining a six-figure PE ratio for a capital-intensive, heavy industry manufacturer is quite the feat and is probably not something seen since the 19th century railroad bubbles.
Perhaps Musk's right wing pivot is the psychological effect of being a billionaire with tens of millions of worshipful fanboys, Twitter followers, and the media constantly talking about him, essentially training him to become a narcissist in the mold of Trump. The experience no doubt changes a person. Musk's stated goals have shifted from getting rich (PayPal era) to saving humanity (Tesla and SpaceX era) to making Twitter un-moderated like 4-chan, 8-chan, Parlor, Telegram, and a dozen other companies, ostensibly to save freedom of speech. These changes reflect Musk's changing arc of meaning, going from selfishness to heroism and then finally to the combination of those features - narcissism. Musk is also the uber-generation-Xer in the sense that he distrusts and wants to dismantle existing institutions like banking, currencies, various industries, social media platforms, and eventually governments.
This urge to innovatively disrupt institutions now clashes with the vision of the Democratic party, which seeks to preserve certain old institutions such as unions, anti-monopoly regulation, and the United States' traditional form of government. Democrats applauded Musk when he was disrupting Wall Street banks and the fossil fuel industry, but now his disruption is encroaching on things they hold dear. Even more terrifying to them is Musk's proven talent, not at building better things per se, which would limit his effect to the change he alone could accomplish, but in convincing other people to buy into memes of innovative disruption. What happens when such a person buys themselves a platform like Twitter?