My belief is that yes, tulpas are people of their own (and therefore moral patients). My reasoning is as follows.
If I am a person and have a tulpa and they are not a person of their own, then there must either (a) exist some statement which is a requirement for personhood and which is true about me but not true about the tulpa, or (b) the tulpa and I must be the same person.
In the case of (a), tulpas have analogues to emotions, desires, beliefs, personality, sense of identity, and they behave intelligently. They seem to have everything that I care about in a person. Your mileage may vary, but I've thought about this subject a lot and have not been able to find anything that tulpas are missing which seems like it might be an actual requirement for personhood. Note that a useful thought experiment when investigating possible requirements for personhood that tulpas don't meet is to imagine a non-tulpa with an analogous disability, and see if you would still consider the non-tulpa with that disability to be a person.
Now, if we grant that the tulpa is a person, we must still show that (b) is wrong, and that they are not the same person as the their headmate. My argument here is also very simple. I simply observe that tulpas have different emotions, desires, beliefs, personality, and sense of identity than their headmate. Since these are basically all the things I actually care about in a person, it doesn't make sense to say that someone who differs in all those ways is the same. In addition, I don't think that sharing a brain is a good reason to say that they are the same person, for a similar reason to why I wouldn't consider myself to be the same person as an AI that was simulating me inside its own processors.
Obviously, as with all arguments about consciousness and morality, these arguments are not airtight, but I think they show that the personhood of tulpas should not be easily dismissed.
Edit: I've provided my personal definition of the word "tulpa" in my second reply to Slider below. I do not have a precise definition of the word "person", but I challenge readers to try to identify what difference between tulpas and non-tulpas they think would disqualify a tulpa from being a person.
Your heuristic is only useful if it's actually true that being self-sustaining is strongly correlated with being a person. If this is not true, then you are excluding things that are actually people based on a bad heuristic. I think it's very important to get the right heuristics: I've been wrong about what qualified as a person before, and I have blood on my hands because of it.
I don't think it's true that being self-sustaining is strongly correlated with being a person, because being self-sustaining has nothing to do with personhood, and because in my own experience I've been able to create mental constructs which I believe were people and which I was able to start and stop at will.
Edit: You provided evidence that being self-sustaining implies personhood with high probability, and I agree with that. However, you did not provide evidence of the converse, nor for your assertion that it's not possible to "insert breakpoints" in human plurality. This second part is what I disagree with.
I think there are some forms of plurality where it's not possible to insert breakpoints, such as your alters, and some forms where it is possible, such as mine, and I think the latter is not too uncommon, because I did it unknowingly in the past.