In May 2021, the Tesla boss moderated the famous comedy show “Saturday Night Live” in the USA – and made his Asperger’s disease public.
(Photo: IMAGO/ZUMA Wire)
Dusseldorf Tesla boss Elon Musk triggered international outrage with his “peace plan” for Ukraine published on Twitter. According to his proposal on Monday, the residents of the Russian-occupied territories in the east of the country should vote “under the supervision of the United Nations” to which country they want to belong. Crimea should finally be assigned to Russia and Ukraine should declare itself “neutral”.
The Ukrainian President Zelensky then left vote on twitterwhether his followers would rather have a pro-Ukraine Elon Musk or a pro-Russian one. The country’s ambassador to Germany, Andriy Melnyk, used an expletive as a “very diplomatic response”.
Russian opposition figure and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov called the ideas “moral idiocy” and “a repetition of Kremlin propaganda”. Only Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov agreed, saying on Tuesday that many of the billionaire’s proposals “deserved attention”.
The storm of indignation was easy to foresee. Which begs the question: Why is Musk doing this? Does he want to push himself to the fore at all costs and get attention? Or does the richest person in the world live in a bubble and grossly overestimate himself?
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A look back at Musk’s biography suggests a different reason. The suggestion coincides with the 51-year-old’s long-term behavioral patterns. Musk uses intelligence and abstraction skills to analyze technical and business problems. This has often led to unusual and sometimes ingenious solutions. At the same time, Musk showed little sensitivity to the emotional consequences of his ideas.
Musk breaks problems down into their component parts
Emotions play a secondary role for Musk. This goes hand in hand with Musk’s management philosophy, “First Principle Thinking”: As in physics, every problem is broken down into its elementary components in order to find solutions from there, regardless of sensitivities.
One example is his aerospace company SpaceX: A good two decades ago, Musk calculated how expensive the components of a rocket are and compared them with the prices on the market. The difference was so great that his conclusion was: It’s worth building the rockets yourself. A technically insanely difficult undertaking, SpaceX was repeatedly faced with the end. Today it is one of the highest rated private companies in the world.
How little Musk cares about the opinions of others can be seen in his companies. Musk repeatedly showed extreme hardness towards himself, but also towards his employees. Terminations without notice and screaming fits are not uncommon, as biographers describe in numerous books and articles.
There is no sadism behind it, but an attitude to life: Musk works extremely hard and a lot. He often talks about overnight stays in factories and conference rooms. He expects the same from his employees. “I could live on my private island with naked supermodels and drink mai tais – but I don’t do that,” Musk is supposed to reproach his people, for example, as Wall Street Journal reporter Tim Higgins writes in his book “Power Play”.
Elon Musk on Twitter: “Obviously for Ukraine”
One reason for this behavior is Musk’s Asperger’s disease, a type of autism. The Tesla boss made it public more than a year ago. This is difficult for outsiders to recognize and goes hand in hand with limited empathy, weak social skills and often introverted interests – be it programming, physics or space travel, as with Musk.
Renata Konkoly also raised the point on Twitter: “I’m an aspie myself,” wrote the Hungarian in response to the peace proposal, “and I understand that he’s hyper-focused on the issue.” But Musk’s tweets “won’t help – they actually make Ukrainians angry”.
Musk replied, “You assume I’m trying to make myself popular. I don’t care. What I care about is that millions of people will die needlessly for exactly the same outcome.” Russia has more than three times the population of Ukraine, making Ukraine’s victory in an all-out war unlikely.
The attempt by the Tesla boss to transfer his supposedly rational way of thinking to political issues can be regarded as a failure. Musk was one of the early supporters of Ukraine and made Starlink’s satellite internet, which is immensely important for the communication infrastructure, available to the country free of charge.
This aid has now reached a value of $80 million, Musk said. “Our support for Russia: zero dollars,” he wrote on Twitter. “Obviously we are for Ukraine.”
More: “No Ukrainian will buy your Tesla crap” – Musk’s “peace plan” causes outrage in Ukraine