Yeah, he was always that bad. There is a an excellent example in Eric Berger’s book about SpaceX early days(Lift off). I don’t remember the exact details, but there is a critical failure with one of the rockets, and Elon blames it on one of the best engineers. Later is found out it was not his fault, but Elon never apologised which just leaves vibes in the company.

And overall feel of reading the book that Elon treats everyone kinda bad, it is just not directly stated.

sorry, to hear that happened to you! I have paid VPN and use it to isolate devices on my network that i don’t trust (not torrenting).

I would never trust 100% a vpn running on the same machine as the app that needs the connection.

Probably super paranoid, but always use one of those VPN boxes with separate ethernet sockets - for input and out connection. Quite cheap on Amazon. I assume they run Linux and when they loose the VPN just crap out instead of exposing my home network.