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Did you know Elon Musk has Asperger's
Of course! Never any doubt! 59%  59%  [ 27 ]
No I didn't - what a shock. 30%  30%  [ 14 ]
Who is Elon Musk? 11%  11%  [ 5 ]
Total votes : 46

ASPartOfMe
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10 May 2021, 7:08 pm

Mr Reynholm wrote:
I have heard people speculate that Musk had Aspergers.
He is mistaken about being the first host to have it though, Dan Aykroyd had hosted in 2003.

Dan Ackroyd's "Aspergers" is debatable for reasons I laid out in that linked thread 6 years ago.


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10 May 2021, 7:32 pm

If I were as "quiet" a child as Elon Musk apparently was, maybe I would have accomplished more in life. I was the kind of kid who "talked too much."

Am I surprised he has Asperger's? Not really. But it doesn't really matter, to be honest.

I don't know what sort of person he is----but he is certainly driven in some aspects of things.



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10 May 2021, 7:52 pm

Driven yes, capable, debatably, hoarding intellectual property isn't the same thing as inventing it. Some of the first cars were EVs. Soyuz capsules still work.

Tesla is a supply chain empire like Apple, not an automotive engineering firm. The bumpers fall off in the rain, the "autopilot" kills gullible owners, the options are all software licenses that you can't have on the used market and the Porsche Taycan is more durable.

Who wants a heavy performance car with no cornering ability anyway? Hype beasts.


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10 May 2021, 7:53 pm

I harbor more respect for SpaceX but let's get real & stop giving one raging narcissist all the credit.


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old_comedywriter
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10 May 2021, 7:58 pm

Too bad he's also a dick.


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cberg
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10 May 2021, 8:09 pm

Can we advance-ban Elon from WP for misrepresenting us on national TV under the guise of comedy?

I'm not obligated to put up with being a pop culture trope & neither are you.


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11 May 2021, 6:34 am

hearhear , on this im with cberg
people get so easy dazzled by notoriety
"subsidy-king" as cunning businessman hoovering in big lumps of subventions & running on pr pr pr

maybe it's another money move ??
go with the subventions, any way the wind blows ??
https://atomicinsights.com/hero-worship ... elon-musk/
https://revolttolive.com/2021/02/16/ame ... elon-musk/

Image



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11 May 2021, 10:42 am

MarketWatch: "WATCH: Elon Musk reveals he has Asperger’s syndrome on ‘SNL’ — here’s why that’s raising some eyebrows"

The article mentions one viewer's comment: "Normalizing Asperger’s is huge.” I suspect that is true. My diagnosis arrived so soon before the Pandemic (and surgeries--I'm old) that I really haven't "come out" with my diagnosis except with my medical providers, my immediate family, and WP (respectively: disinterested, interested in what it means to them, and pleasantly interesting). When I do finally rejoin post-Pandemic society I would prefer people learning of my diagnosis to not think it means I'm Rain Man, but rather that it is just some personal trivia, similar to me also being INTJ.

Also, I would think that the more Aspies that are "out", the more people will realize that if you've met one Aspie then you've met one Aspie. (Ditto for other folk on the Spectrum.) I am not Rain Man. I'm not Musk. Even though all three of us are Aspies, I'm not them, I'm me! The more people know that, the better.


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11 May 2021, 10:50 am

I do not believe he normalized anything. Much the opposite.


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11 May 2021, 11:34 am

Double Retired wrote:
MarketWatch: "WATCH: Elon Musk reveals he has Asperger’s syndrome on ‘SNL’ — here’s why that’s raising some eyebrows"

The article mentions one viewer's comment: "Normalizing Asperger’s is huge.” I suspect that is true. My diagnosis arrived so soon before the Pandemic (and surgeries--I'm old) that I really haven't "come out" with my diagnosis except with my medical providers, my immediate family, and WP (respectively: disinterested, interested in what it means to them, and pleasantly interesting). When I do finally rejoin post-Pandemic society I would prefer people learning of my diagnosis to not think it means I'm Rain Man, but rather that it is just some personal trivia, similar to me also being INTJ.

Also, I would think that the more Aspies that are "out", the more people will realize that if you've met one Aspie then you've met one Aspie. (Ditto for other folk on the Spectrum.) I am not Rain Man. I'm not Musk. Even though all three of us are Aspies, I'm not them, I'm me! The more people know that, the better.


There is a kind of fallacy in masking or being a closet aspie in that most people kind of suspect it anyway.

A bit like gay people in the closet, after a short time in their company most kind of suspect that person may not be straight.

All it does is confirm people’s intuition.

I’m not convinced Ellon is an aspie yet until he reveals he’s been officially diagnosed.

It’s rather common these days to seek a label via google to explain things, while discounting other explanations.

I can see no obvious life struggle that those of us on the spectrum have.

Being a victim in the celebrity world does give some advantages.

He has so much money he could have paid an assessor to rubber stamp a diagnosis for him if he thought there was an advantage for him.


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11 May 2021, 2:58 pm

Elon Musk has Asperger's? The playboy and entrepeneur who's been married 3 times and was Amber Heard's paramour?

Are we sure this isn't just some "I'm special, my brain is special" narcissistic stuff of the sort Musk has been accused of before?


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11 May 2021, 3:11 pm

Whale_Tuune wrote:
Elon Musk has Asperger's? The playboy and entrepeneur who's been married 3 times and was Amber Heard's paramour?

Are we sure this isn't just some "I'm special, my brain is special" narcissistic stuff of the sort Musk has been accused of before?


Since you put it like that it all seems a bit of a joke. More trivializeation of Autism and our problems from the cesspit of the celeb world.

Im sure all will be revealed in the next interview


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11 May 2021, 6:34 pm

It's a PR attention grab whatever the truth is.


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13 May 2021, 7:09 am

Two different Autistic perspectives

Elon Musk Revealed He Has Autism. It's a Milestone for People Like Me

Quote:
When Elon Musk took the stage to host Saturday Night Live last week, controversy ensued, with cast members expressing their displeasure on social media. And yet, it was on another front entirely that Musk made news on Saturday night, announcing casually that during his opening monologue that he was "making history tonight as the first person with Asperger's to host SNL."

He received enormous applause for the revelation from the audience

Still, despite the pushback, some of it justified, Musk's announcement represents a small but significant milestone in the history of neurodiversity. When you consider how few autistic public figures of his stature there are, his mere mention of his neurodivergence is a potential gateway to greater visibility and acceptance.

In 1986, Temple Grandin broke barriers when she published her book Emergence, making her one of the first people to speak publicly about her autism, and for decades she was almost singularly synonymous with autism, with an award-winning HBO movie about her life. But outside science and academia, there have been few celebrities on the spectrum to truly break through into the public consciousness, a lack of visibility has created a misperception of what autism is.

I can attest to this because I'm autistic, and until I was diagnosed at 25, I had wrongly associated it with being confined to a particular type of person with unusual behavioral issues and more pronounced learning disabilities.

For Elon Musk to proudly declare he has Asperger's is significant, considering he's one of the wealthiest people in the world and seen by many as a pop culture icon. Whatever one makes of his controversial persona, it's affirming to see someone so accomplished proudly share he's on the spectrum when for so long, that's been considered an unspeakable thing. When he made his statement and received applause, it was nice to see. I also recognized for the first time some of the traits we share, notably, his bobbing shoulders and the wavy cadence to his speech.

Musk's casual mention of autism in his monologue also signals a broader cultural shift in the way society perceives marginalized identities. But his announcement also comes with a certain civic responsibility. According to MarketWatch, 85 percent of college grads on the autism spectrum are unemployed, compared to the national unemployment rate of 4.5 percent. And according to the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute, young adults on the autism spectrum have the lowest employment rate among people with disabilities. 42 percent of young adults in their early 20s on the autism spectrum have never held a paying job, a figure that's even lower for autistic young adults who are Black and Hispanic.

I think the bigger point is that Autistic people have a higher unemployment rate than a lot of other people with disabilities," autistic writer and author of the forthcoming book "We're Not Broken" Eric Garcia explained. "They have trouble not just getting jobs but retaining jobs. They have trouble also moving up in companies."

I'm glad that Musk is proud enough of who he is as an autistic person to announce it on TV, but the bottom line is what kinds of support and accommodations he offers to the other folks on the spectrum who work at his companies," Steve Silberman, the author of a bestselling book on the history of autism, "NeuroTribes," told me.

Musk may not be the ideal role model for the autistic community and its urgent needs, but with so few public figures to look up to, the significance of his announcement can't be dismissed either. Many people admire the billionaire, and it's exciting that he has admitted that he's a member of the autism community.

Given the fact that autistic adults were virtually invisible to society until Temple Grandin's "coming out" in the 1980s, the billionaire's celebration of his neurodivergence is a sign of social progress. No longer something to be feared, it's something to take pride in.

It took me over two decades to feel that for myself.



The One Big Problem With Elon Musk’s Autism Announcement by Sara Luterman
Quote:
At Newsweek, opinion contributor Peter Fox described it as a “small but significant milestone in the history of neurodiversity.” There aren’t that many openly autistic writers out there, and we tend to know each other, so I want to be clear that I respect Peter Fox deeply. However, I could not disagree with him more on the nature of this “milestone.” Musk’s “coming out” is self-serving and hollow, a poor attempt at laundering his image as a heartless billionaire more concerned with cryptocurrency and rocket ships than the lives of others.

The Asperger/Autism Network, a small New England nonprofit, told TMZ that traffic to its website more than doubled after Musk made his announcement, and at CNN Business, Alexis Benveniste praised Musk, saying that his disclosure “opened up a larger conversation about business leadership and the autism spectrum.” Comedian Jeremy McLellan, who is also on the spectrum, sarcastically joked, “inspiring moment of progress for everyone on the spectrum who is also a billionaire,” followed by a heart emoji.* Either way, Musk is hardly representative of the community at large. In January, CNBC announced that Musk was the richest man in the world, surpassing Jeff Bezos of Amazon with a net worth of $185 billion. Meanwhile, most autistic people live in poverty. In the most recent data out of the United Kingdom, less than 22 percent of autistic people had any kind of employment. Older studies in the United States also suggest a remarkably high rate of unemployment. According to the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute, autistics have the lowest employment rate among disabled people. Autistic people are at high risk of homelessness—I have experienced unstable housing myself.

In addition to poverty, autistic people are also at elevated risk of police violence. This is especially true when they are Black, Latino, or Indigenous.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk spent the past year spreading COVID misinformation, donating fake ventilators to hospitals, and forcing Tesla workers to go back to their factory jobs despite the risk to their health, resulting in 450 employees becoming infected. (It is unclear if any died.) Musk’s decision to force open his factories is unsurprising. He has a long history of opposing labor rights. In 2017, Musk even faced legal consequences for threatening to retaliate against employees for attempting to unionize.

of this, of course, could be dismissed as mere autistic eccentricity. Musk certainly seems to want that. “Look, I know I say or post strange things but that’s just how my brain works,” he said during his SNL monologue. “To anyone I have offended, I just want to say I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars on a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?” Apparently, Asperger’s syndrome means never having to say you’re sorry.

So what has Elon Musk done to help his supposed peers on the spectrum? Well, a few years ago, he claimed that his venture Neuralink would someday create brain implants that would “solve” autism, along with conditions like schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease. When? No one knows. For reference, Elon Musk has long made promises about self-driving cars with little basis in reality. I can’t speak for all autistic people, but I feel confident saying that most want the same things I want: safety, housing, meaningful employment, friendship, independence. Brain chips to magically fix autism aren’t exactly a priority.

“Musk may not be the ideal role model for the autistic community and its urgent needs,” Peter Fox writes, “but with so few public figures to look up to, the significance of his announcement can’t be dismissed either.” Elon Musk is not a role model. Most of us aren’t going to ever be billionaires. What is there to look up to? It’s like trying to look up to a zebra or a space alien. We aren’t even the same species. Our lives bear so little resemblance to his. He isn’t interested in ameliorating poverty or helping other autistic people lead good lives. He’s interested in Dogecoin and rocket ships. Another rich white tech guy says he’s on the spectrum. So what?


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13 May 2021, 7:43 am

Autism and our symptoms are the reason for our unemployment and poverty with society views playing only a small part.

The truth of it is many of us make poor employees, our problems with memory, inability to concentrate on tasks and poor communication skills make us more inefficient than those of other disabilities like wheelchair users or the blind for example.

I’ve been hired and fired many times due to my difficulties in adjusting to new situations, learning the job tasks and coping with distractions.

On occasion when I did successfully learn a job I had a high error rate due to my inability to focus above that of the colleagues. My bosses at the time went out of there way to help me and give me a chance but inevitably I usually got fired eventually.

I’m in work now I had to basically force my brain to learn and focus after years of being hired and fired. But I’m always fearful of having to learn something new and how ill cope with it.

The point I’m making is ASD is a spectrum of disability and Ellon Musk being on it on the far end of ability won’t make us more functional and won’t improve our life at all.


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14 May 2021, 3:34 am

Fun fact: It's likely Elon Musk's current wife, the musician Grimes is also on the spectrum