Elon Musk was up early on Saturday. He departed Los Angeles, where he runs SpaceX, his private rocket venture, and flew north in his white Gulfstream jet. Stopping in Silicon Valley, he picked up two engineers from Tesla, his electric-car company. They flew on to Reno, Nev., where they spent the day at Tesla’s battery plant, the Gigafactory.

It might have been just another workday for Mr. Musk — a multistate jaunt to personally fix a drive-unit production line. But this was no ordinary morning. He was a brief night’s sleep removed from one of his most consequential decisions: scrapping his plan to take Tesla private.

It was an abrupt about-face, and it capped a tumultuous two and a half weeks that began with a single tweet and wound up roiling markets, setting off regulatory alarms and raising questions about his judgment. Even by Mr. Musk’s standards — this is a C.E.O. who believes Tesla is under attack by saboteurs, has a personal life playing out in the gossip blogs and is prone to fiery outbursts on Twitter — it has been a time of high intrigue.

“The reason Elon seems to attract drama is that he is so transparent, so open, in a way that can come back to bite him,” said Kimbal Musk, Mr. Musk’s younger brother and a Tesla board member. “He doesn’t know how to do it differently. It’s just who he is.”