> "Businessman" would require strong social skills, not something someone with aspergers has good ability at.
This exact nonsense is why the autistic community was so displeased when he made a big show of having "asperger's" (which in the US under DSM-V is just autism, btw). Can we please stop justifying toxic and reckless behavior with "oh but they're autistic" as if we're talking about naive children not grown adults?
Autistics tend to struggle with ambiguity and social cues, yes, but many of us are even more sensitive to social cues than allistics because we literally had to learn to pick up on this shit to survive. A lot of autistics report actually being hyper-empathetic to the point where it can be debilitating because it's hard to filter out the noise and determine which cues you're supposed to pick up on and which ones you're supposed to ignore.
Elon Musk is a dickhead AND autistic. He's not a dickhead because he's autistic. He's naive because he got extremely lucky (like all billionaires do, even if it's only winning the lottery of being born into wealthy families with ample of business opportunities) and overestimates his own intelligence (which isn't helped by his massive fanbase thinking he's the best thing since sliced bread because he bought and funded some companies developing tech he thought was cool), not because he's autistic.
There's no such thing as "the autistic community" (though I won't deny some people may self-proclaim themselves as part of some non-existent community) and I'm not justifying anything by what I said. It's just how he thinks.
And I, as an autist, am telling you that this is a farcical caricature that is routinely used to excuse shitty behavior and at the same time deny us autonomy.
He has not built anything.
Also, his official title at SpaceX is "Chief Engineer" [0]
Selling a startup is not an engineering achievment but a business achievment.
> Also, his official title at SpaceX is "Chief Engineer"
Owning a company means you can give yourself whatever titles you want.
So your entire argument seems to boil down to "he wrote code for Zip2", which happened a quarter of a century ago.
EDIT: And they think they are Musk as well. Without the same ability to raise money that's incredible dangerous so.
Isn't that a little mean, and elitist?
No person is perfect. And Elon Musk certainly has flaws. But saying he's not built anything about someone playing a crucial role in 3+ huge companies just feels wrong.
If we compare him to the CEO's of the other Fortune 50 companies, he seems like one of the most engineering-minded.
I'm not saying he's never written a line of code. I'm saying he's vastly exaggerating his contributions to the technologies he is known for and his only "engineering" credentials are unspecified contributions to a dot com boom software company that repurposed an existing navigation database for its USP while essentially selling web listings to companies.
When people hear Musk is an "engineer" I doubt they're thinking of someone probably just writing some HTML2.0 pages and CGI Perl scripts, if that. It's also important to keep in mind that the history of Zip2 is scantly documented beyond "the brothers Musk founded it and then sold it for millions some years later" so we don't even know if Elon wrote even a single line of code or whether he meaningfully contributed to the software at all.
Even if we're exceptionally credulous and believe he wrote all of Zip2 himself, that makes him a programmer, not an engineer in the sense it is implied when talking about his involvement in Tesla or SpaceX. Knowing how to build physical machines is very different from knowing how to write software, and I say that as a seasoned software dev.
And actually he's not a "businessman" at all. He's an engineer at heart. "Businessman" would require strong social skills, not something someone with aspergers has good ability at.