I'm leaning more towards the latter because, apart from the more recent tantrums, he seems to be quite good at fantastic promises, stalling with vague "everything is under control" replies, and deliberately ignoring questions where a halfway honest reply would incriminate him.
He was writing checks he couldn't cash. There were already merchants lined up. The website will interface with the wallet. On top of collecting info on all of us. That the premine would be used for giveaway and bounties. It was lie after lie to get people to buy the coin once it hit the exchange. Once he started to dump it all fell apart. When there are only 50 million coins in the wild and billions start to show up on the exchanges it was all over.