Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and the Autism Thing
In a misguided attempt to be fun and accessible, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg posted a picture of himself on the popular social networking site with his family on Halloween dressed like John Wick.
Zuckerberg is so rich that he could hire John Wick’s costume designer to make a John Wick costume for him. He’s so ridiculously wealthy that he could probably buy Keanu Reeves’ actual costume from the films.
So, it both made sense and did not make sense that Zuckerberg looked like he bought a “Hitman Action Hero” costume at Spirit Halloween or purchased his get-up secondhand at Goodwill.
When I saw Zuckerberg looking deeply unhappy and deeply uncomfortable, I felt the same way that I did when he testified in front of congress in 2018.
The photograph of Zuckerberg looking clammy, anxious and faintly robotic was shared through social media with wisecracks about the social media billionaire attempting to appear human without success.
This, in turn, made me think about various pictures that I’ve seen of Zuckerberg’s fellow mega-billionaire/social media maven Elon Musk looking various shades of absolutely ridiculous.
I have a folder of spectacularly unflattering images of the richest man in the world. There are so, so many pictures to choose from. There’s the vintage pick of Musk smoking a joint with his best friend, Joe Rogan, in a manner that’s supposed to express enthusiasm but instead suggests that he’s never engaged in the deplorable practice of smoking marijuana before and will never do so again.
Then there are the richly humiliating photos of “Cowboy” Elon Musk trying to look badass in a backward cowboy hat and practicing shooting his gun.
But the billionaire’s most recent photographic humiliation is tough to beat for iconic idiocy. I am speaking, of course, of various images of Musk, a billionaire in his fifties with fifteen ex-wives and over seventy children, leaping with joy and excitement over Donald Trump’s existence at a rally.
Musk looks less like a dignified adult than an excitable child who just learned that he was getting a Super Nintendo for Christmas in 1991.
Though he has enough money to be the best, most expensively dressed man in the world, Musk wore black mom jeans and a tee shirt that was not quite big enough so that his soft white belly poked out.
Musk looked so unhinged that even Donald Trump seemed vaguely embarrassed by him, and Trump is seemingly incapable of shame or embarrassment.
When I looked at Musk jumping with delight over being Dark MAGA, I thought, “Jesus, what a fucking dork.”
That was my first response. My second response was that Musk is the world’s most famous autistic man, and what I was watching was a symptom of being neurodivergent.
We autistic folk don’t always have the best judgment, nor are we always able to read social situations and behave in a way that’s not deeply embarrassing. That’s what I see when I see Musk jumping up and down with joy about Donald Fucking Trump with tens of thousands of people looking on in mortification.
Musk and I are very different people with very different attitudes towards being neurodivergent. Though I was only diagnosed within the last year, I know that I have a lot of limitations in terms of executive functioning and understanding the world, other people, and social structures. I consequently need a lot of accommodations from a world that was not designed for the neurodivergent.
The owner of what I will always call Twitter obviously sees things much differently. He seems to think he has no limitations and doesn’t need shit from a world he is clearly superior to. That’s why he responded to advertisers fleeing Twitter in horror by telling them to go fuck themselves.
Musk has consistently shown very bad judgment and a complete inability to read social situations. I suspect that if he were neurotypical, he’d realize that much of his behavior was cringe-worthy and behave in a more mature, adult fashion.
The obscenely wealthy South African’s autism does not excuse his behavior. It does not excuse being a raging asshole or treating people abhorrently, but it does help explain it.
That’s why I despise Musk and everything that he stands for, but I also have some empathy because I know what it’s like to have a brain that works in strange and sometimes wonderful and sometimes unfortunate ways.
Musk lacks humility and empathy, which I’m sure are huge assets in business and a huge liability in being a good person. He is most assuredly not a good person.
Incidentally, I saw an article about how Elon Musk was the host who made Saturday Night Live cast member Chloe Fineman cry with his cruelty. A commenter posited Musk’s autism as the probable cause of his behavior. Autism helps explain why Musk is bad at reading social cues, but it does not excuse his being an asshole.
Musk is openly autistic. Zuckerberg, to my knowledge, is not. It’s impossible to tell just from a picture or a video clip whether or not someone is autistic, but it sure seems like Zuckerberg is, at the very least, on the autism spectrum but feels self-conscious or ambivalent about being neurodivergent and also is very bad at masking.
The more Zuckerberg tries to seem like an ordinary, neurotypical person, the more neurodivergent he seems. The alien or robotic gestures, behaviors, and expressions that have made Zuckerberg a figure of online mockery to me read as symptoms of being autistic.
It makes sense that these strange men would be attracted to social media, as we autistic folks tend to be anti-social by nature, but the virtual nature of social media is perfect for us because you don’t have to make eye contact, or small talk or endure painful, awkward silences on Twitter or Facebook.
I have more sympathy for Zuckerberg than Musk because he’s less openly evil and arrogant; there’s a messy, doomed humanity to his attempts to convince the neurotypical public that he’s an ordinary guy just like them that I find touching. It's amoral to be as rich and powerful as Musk and Zuckerberg, but Zuckerberg seems less intent on using his money and power to single-handedly make this a worse planet to live on.
I wish I had the kind of autism that makes you brilliant at business and science. Instead, I have the kind of autism that renders you uniquely inept and clueless when it comes to money and technology. Yet I can relate enough to Musk and Zuckerberg’s neurospicy cringiness to have at least a little sympathy for these capitalist devils.
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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