At various moments in “Elon Musk,” Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the world’s richest person, the author tries to make sense of the billionaire entrepreneur he has shadowed for two years — sitting in on meetings, getting a peek at emails and texts, engaging in “scores of interviews and late-night conversations.”

The author includes a gift link to the full NYTimes article.

  • nyoooom
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    31 year ago

    Could you give more details into why he wouldn’t be autistic? From the outside he does have some pretty obvious autistic traits (speech, empathy issues, obsession with some things such as the letter X), so without more arguments your answer isn’t very convincing to me

    • @[email protected]
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      31 year ago

      If I may forward you to this video which did a decent enough job at exposing Elon’s claims regarding Aspergers as very questionable to say the least. It’s not 100% spot on, but we’re dealing with Elon Musk here. He contradicts himself so often you’re bound to slip at some point when trying to analyse him. There are, however, some helpful additions in the comments from people with own experiences, that give some more context on what High functioning Autism really means.

      Let me also remind you that a hand full of traits, however pronounced they may be, isn’t nearly enough to even suggest a diagnosis. There’s dozens of common traits of high functioning Autism. So inevitably most people will meet some criterias. What’s more important is what boxes they don’t check and that’s a very long list for Elon. And I’m the last person to try to seriously diagnose Elon, but Aspergers isn’t it, chief.

      • nyoooom
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        21 year ago

        I’ll try to have a look at it, but please note that Common Sense Skeptic is famous, at least in the SpaceX community, as making a lot of bad faith arguments as soon as it’s related in some ways to Elon.

        (I’m not saying that to say you’re wrong, I just feel like it might be interesting to have that in mind ;) )

        • @[email protected]
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          21 year ago

          That is fair and I don‘t even agree with all of his conclusions there, but the arguments and evidence he brings forward are helpful enough to draw own conclusions and the comments help a lot as swell. I personally think the little SpaceX criticism he sprinkled into the video are spot on as well, but that might not be the case with other videos of his. It‘s definitely Elon‘s company with the least bs when it comes to delivering. So I can see how one could falsely predict failures there and be surprised later.