Walter Isaacson, whose biography on Elon Musk is set to come out this fall, repeated his narrative about the Tesla CEO as a kind of flawed genius.
Walter Isaacson, whose biography on Elon Musk is set to come out this fall, repeated his narrative about the Tesla CEO as a kind of flawed genius.
Could also just be quite a bit further along the autism spectrum.
Hard to say for sure, but he’s never struck me as sincerely psychopathic. Narcissistic sure, but not really psychopathic.
Autistic people feel empathy.
I mean he profits from the suffering of others. I don’t see how that’s not psychopathic
Because that’s not the definition of psychopath.
Most of us profit from the suffering of others. Does that make us all psychopaths?
In any case, I would probably classify him as evil, regardless of whether he’s a psychopath.
The three core traits of psychopathy:
• Arrogant and deceitful interpersonal style: impression management or superficial charm, inflated and grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying/deceit, and manipulation for personal gain.
Everything about this describes Elon.
• Deficient affective experience: lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affect (coldness and unemotionality), callousness and lack of empathy, and failure to accept responsibility for own actions.
Several people have described this about him, especially his first wife. This article is about this. And he routinely blames others for negative things that happen. He called a professional diver a pedophile for not liking his stupid submarine idea to rescue those kids from that cave, and doubled and tripled down on it when called out. Again, not accepting responsibility for his own idea being dumb, he had to deflect and slander someone else.
•Impulsive and irresponsible lifestyle: impulsivity, sensation-seeking and risk-taking, irresponsible and unreliable behavior, financially parasitic lifestyle and lack of realistic, long-term goals.
This is a man that will do monumentally stupid shit on a whim, which has landed him with fines from the SEC. Like saying he was taking Tesla private, that he already secured funding, etc. None of which happened. He ended up buying Twitter based on an impulse tweet and got stuck with it after signing the contract without doing any due diligence at all. He has thousands of engineers behind him that make his impulse claims come true a lot. And several of them across companies have come out and said that they didn’t know about features until Elon just tweeted them out.
By pretty much all metrics he is a psychopath. He just has the money for an army of people to keep him in line enough.
This is not a good descriptor of paychopathy. Psychopaths are essentially people with antisocial personality disorder, you can look up the DSM or ICD 10 entry for that, having those traits is not enough to secure a psychopath label.
The ICD-10 is out of date. The current revision is ICD-11, which collapsed all personality disorders into one single “Personality Disorder” diagnosis. Antisocial Personality Disorder doesn’t even exist anymore.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD-11#Personality_disorder
Psychopathy is a trait of Personality Disorder. Not a standalone diagnosis.
ICD isn’t a diagnostic manual. It’s just for medical record and bill coding.
It absolutely is. It’s the main diagnostic manual for most of the world, maintained by the WHO and covers all diseases.
The DSM is largely just an American thing and solely deals with mental disorders.
The ICD is more commonly used for clinical diagnosis than the DSM even in the US.
I stand corrected.
Most of us don’t willingly profit from the exploitation of others
The dude fired a bunch of people, never paid their severance and refuses to communicate with them. The dude is a fucking complete sociopath. He lies to investors about deadlines, he lies about the potential of his technology to consumers, and he lies to his own staff.
You can stop simping for him, he doesn’t want to ride your dick, mate.
What was this firing people?
Hmm yeah I’ve never been able to decide if his lying is because he’s actually delusional or if he is a sociopath.
I mean either way I think he’s an idiot. But I’m not sure of the root cause.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_empathy_problem
Autistic people feel empathy. Source - am autistic, feel (pretty strong and sometimes unpleasant) empathy.
Oh for sure. But an autistic psychopath may not.
Definitely not equating the two. I’m well aware that autistic people are often more empathetic, not less.
But some of his mannerisms just strike me as somewhat autistic. He doesn’t strike me as a straight psychopath.
People on the spectrum generally do feel empathy it is of a different sort than people who are NT.