I find it interesting that after making hundreds of billions of dollars (on paper) running Tesla and SpaceX, the openly autistic Musk has shown nothing but incompetence since taking over twitter. First he buys the company for tens of billions of dollars more than it’s worth, and then naively thinks he can be a free speech absolutist in a company funded by advertisers in the most politically correct era in centuries, causing the sponsors to leave in droves and now his employees are leaving too. Smelling blood in the water, he is being persecuted by the media while his own fans are turning on him too and his net worth has declined by over $100 billion dollars since around this time last year.

Of course, on paper he remains the richest man on Earth but for how much longer?

Many bitter losers on the left are using Musk’s failure and as a chance to argue that meritocracy is a myth and the super rich can be as dumb as the rest of us.

But I don’t see Musk’s potential downfall as so much an IQ problem, but more specifically, an autism problem. When he was running companies like Tesla and SpaceX he could rely on his math IQ which is probably above 150, but twitter is a social media company, not a tech company. It’s all about making social judgements regarding how much free speech to allow, where to draw the line, how to deal with advertisers etc.

Intelligence is the ability to adapt. One psychologist (Sternberg?) went further and said (I’m paraphrasing from memory) “intelligence is the ability to adapt to your environment and if that’s not possible to change your environment and if that’s not possible, to find a new environment and adapt to it”

But Elon did the opposite. He was in an environment he was perfectly adapted to (technology) but because lower social IQ, got tricked into entering an environment that autistics are maladapted to (social media). Through legal maneuvering, liberals ripped him off to the tune of tens of billions and now have him cornered in their own backyard like a frightened rat.

In my opinion, the autistic mind maintains childlike neuroplasticity that allows it to adapt to new environments, which is why he’s good at creating green cars and going to Mars (both involve novelty). But metabolically it’s very expensive to have a brain that has enough connections to adapt to any new environment, so we evolved to prune neurons for events that were unlikely to happen anytime soon (going to Mars) and to strengthen connections for events we are likely to experience (social interaction).

But in the autistic brain this pruning process goes awry, which might be why Musk is struggling to adapt to Earth’s social rules, while perhaps dreaming of other planets where he might get his mojo back.