I have had a friend since high school and he is like a brother to me. We have a lot of good shared memories.

He has a more-or-less equal "social standing" as me. We both have a mix of different competencies, can beat each other in certain areas, but we more or less balance out to be about the same. We both also had relatively low social standing in the past (in school) and have grown, improved ourselves and increased our social standing over time.

However, he remains deeply insecure around women and non-familiar guys (i.e. in group scenarios) so that he needs to inflate his ego / "in-moment" social standing by putting others down.

Cue to the problem: more often than not this person is me.

I'm not sure if this is (a) out of quiet desperation + fear that he'll bomb socially, and/or (b) an actual belief that he is better than me because he is using a competence heirarchy on which he beats me on as an arbitrary measure of social value (and therefore can pick on me because he's higher in the pecking order, so to speak). He was quicker to ascend the social standing ladder so I suspect he is also desperate to maintain the status quo.

(Note that the group usually does not piggy back on this, because I have strong and positive relationships within the group.)

I usually just ignore him because I know it's coming from a place of insecurity. I've warned him in the past about it, and he stopped for a while, but then started again months later.

However, there's been a "final straw on the camel's back" moment recently that I was simply not able to tolerate.

I'm now in the position of having to decide whether to:
(a) completely drop him as a friend
(b) give him a final opportunity (a come-to-jesus moment, if you will) with no more chances

Any advice on how I should proceed?