Elon and Me
Identifying the autism-to-asshole pipeline
CW: non-graphic mentions of child abuse
Prelude
Ordinarily, I try not to give toxic people any of my attention. I don’t follow them on social media and I definitely don’t write about them.
But recently it’s become impossible to avoid, as Alexandra Petri so cleverly put it, “squinting into the contents of the king’s chamber pot”. Even after I’d abandoned Twitter wholesale, Elon Musk’s shit continued to be so fucked up, and have such outsized consequences, that — short of going offline entirely — it was inescapable.
At one point in late November, overtaken by a fit of Are You Fucking Kidding Me, I fell down a minor rabbit hole of reading journalistic articles describing the bizarre, often horrifying worldviews currently popular among tech billionaires, Musk among them. And an unexpected, eerie thing happened: the more I read, the more I felt like I recognized the substructure beneath all of it.
Because I used to think that way, too.
Act One: Biography of a young genius
I was raised to believe in my own extraordinary intelligence. In my earliest memories, at two and three years old, I already knew — from countless adult reactions — that I was impressively smart. I was labeled ‘gifted’ the moment I entered the school system, and my parents and teachers treated me like a shining academic prodigy.
I was also raised to believe that I was a terrible person. That my character was deeply flawed in almost every conceivable way except for intelligence. That I was lazy, selfish, self-centered, bossy, willful, disobedient, disrespectful, careless, and (ironically) ‘stupid’ about everything that didn’t come from a book.
On top of that, I was badly abused throughout my entire childhood. I was rejected and relentlessly bullied by other kids from preschool straight through into high school. And what my parents did to me — mentally, emotionally, and physically, every day of my life — is the stuff of horror stories.
All of these things led to a young adult whose entire sense of self-worth was tied to her extraordinary intelligence. The fact that I was intelligent I never doubted, as it continued to be reinforced in numerous ways by other people and the world at large. From my late teens through my twenties, people regularly complimented me on three things: my intelligence, my writing ability, and my appearance.
That last kind of compliment rolled off me like water off a duck’s back. I’d been through a lengthy pubescent ugly-duckling phase from age thirteen through sixteen (helped along by a jealous mother who deliberately made me wear unflattering clothes and gave me frizzy poodle perms and bad haircuts), and by the time I got out from under her thumb and swanned at age seventeen, I did not think of my body as really being me. It was just a thing I was carrying around, a jar for my brain. Whether I was pretty or not (and I can see now I was much prettier than I ever knew — I was absolutely luminous) was just genetic luck, so complimenting my appearance was like someone telling me they liked a piece of furniture in my house: nice I guess, but not at all personal.
But whenever someone praised my intelligence — or my writing, which to me was almost the same thing — I felt like they were actually appreciating ‘the real me’. I wholeheartedly bought into the saying “it’s what’s inside that counts.” My body was a randomly-assigned avatar I had little control over, but I eagerly took full credit for my brain. (It would be a long, long time before I recognized the inconsistency in that position.)
I achieved early professional success in my chosen field: I won a regional writing contest at age seventeen, and a national award at age twenty-three. I was accepted into a community of professional authors, a network that led to several subsequent commissions and short fiction sales. I sat on convention panels where strangers came up afterward to gush over something of mine they’d read. I went to parties where literary agents who had read my work sought me out and courted me. One of the most famous authors in the world, someone who to this day has a name to conjure with, made a specific point of praising my talent and encouraging my career.
All of which fed my concept of myself as a brilliant prodigy who would swiftly overcome her traumatic origins and soar to greatness.
My body was a randomly-assigned avatar I had little control over, but I eagerly took full credit for my brain.
By this point, I had already put several years into the project of rooting out and rejecting everything my parents had inculcated me with over the first seventeen years of my life. The ruleset I’d been bequeathed was obviously deeply fucked up and suspect at every level, so I was trying to reinvent ‘how to be a good person’ from first principles.
Unfortunately, in the course of rejecting the gaslighting and abuse that I’d suffered as a child, I also ended up rejecting emotions. In order to ensure I did not ever become anything like the rage-driven creatures who had spawned me, I decided I should strive to approach every conflict or decision from a position of abstract logic … and to expect the same from everyone else.
(If you’re guessing this was a doomed and terrible idea, well done. You are already smarter than I was at twenty-five.)
But of course, I still thought of myself as super-intelligent. In fact, if you’d asked me at the time, I would almost certainly have said that my intelligence made me a superior human being. Wasn’t the whole point of a meritocratic system to ensure that smarter and more talented people were more successful?
I was not — yet — as much of an asshole about this belief as I could have been. In fact, the primary effect of this line of thinking was that I felt a lot more pressure to do something extraordinary as soon as possible, which really didn’t hurt anyone except myself.
But the mindset did seep into some of my relationships and contribute to their demise. Anytime a partner and I disagreed about something, I would lay out my logical arguments for my position, and ask the other person to do the same. I was genuinely open to being proved wrong, but somehow that almost never happened. Instead, my partner would fall back on vague “feelings”, or insist there was a logical reason for their position, albeit one that they couldn’t articulate.
Twenty-something Karawynn gave no quarter to either of these excuses, which meant that I ‘won’ almost every argument. And I genuinely thought things kept playing out this way because I was just … more logical, and therefore more objectively right, than they were.
Which was about as infuriating for the other party as you might expect. This was just one of the many reasons my relationships in my twenties tended not to last for more than a year or two at best.
So there it is, a snapshot of Karawynn in her mid-twenties: traumatized from her childhood, desperate to be loved, with a personal life that’s kind of a trash fire — but also talented, successful, widely perceived as a prodigy, convinced of her own superior intelligence, contemptuous of conventional ways of thinking, worshipping at the altar of logic and rationality.
Sound like anyone else you’ve heard of?
Elon Musk and I are nearly the same age. Twenty-five years on, most of those things are no longer true for me, whereas Musk has tripled-down on all of them. What happened?
Same story, now with critical new information
Let’s back up for a moment and put all of this into a different context, backfilling a quarter-century of self-awareness (and advances in psychology) into the story.
I was born autistic. One of the core features of an autistic neurotype is a ‘spiky’ cognitive profile. If you mapped out skills like a landscape, allistic people mostly have flatlands or gently rolling hills, while autistics have high mountain peaks and deep valleys. The mountains, in this metaphor, are savant or ‘splinter’ skills; the valleys are learning disabilities.
I have a savant skill: hyperlexia. I taught myself to read at the age of two, was reading middle-grade chapter books (I remember Beverly Cleary) at five, and the equivalent of young adult novels (like the Narnia books) by seven. I also read a lot of nonfiction books, including the classroom encyclopedia, and doubtless would have read adult novels too if I’d had any way to access them. I had a gigantic vocabulary and — because I read so much — I simply knew a lot more than other kids my age. By fifth grade I was maxing out IQ tests, with the reading level score of a college student.
As was typical for kids with academic splinter skills like language and math, adults around me mistook the part for the whole. I was labeled ‘gifted’ and expected to be brilliant at everything, across the board, forever. Somehow, even with all the special testing I went through every couple of years, no one figured out that I was also rocking at least three different learning disabilities. (I have the inattentive subtype of ADHD, visual-spatial processing disorder, and central auditory processing disorder.)
I didn’t understand any of that at the time; I just instinctively found ways to use the things I was good at (mountains) to compensate for the things I was bad at (valleys), and for a long time I could almost perform to the exalted academic expectations of the adults around me. It helped a lot that my brain was blindingly fast at processing new information (possibly another splinter skill), so that when I missed something because of my ADHD or CAPD, I could usually catch up without anyone being the wiser.
Socially, however, things were much harder: there were exactly zero areas where I naturally excelled by neurotypical standards. Rather, it was like the operating system that came pre-installed in my brain was entirely incompatible with the one 95% of my peers got. My attempts to connect with other people met with repeated and often catastrophic failure until, in my early teens, I started learning how to camouflage my autism and emulate allistic behavior.
But again, I didn’t have the words for any of that — at the time I just went from “People are inexplicably mean and I’d rather hang out with dogs” (age twelve) to “Oh wait, there are patterns here, they’re reacting to specific things I’m doing and maybe I should figure out what those things are and how to do them differently so they’re less mean to me” (age thirteen).
And thereby began my lifelong, intense, deeply autistic study of human psychology.
My progress was handicapped by the fact that every human’s base assumption — that other people’s abilities and experiences are at least recognizably similar to one’s own — kept turning out to be untrue for me in almost every dimension. Lacking the framework of autism, I had to figure out the nature of each individual divergence by myself, one at a time.
So for example, when a therapist explained to me that my brain was effectively overclocked, and that other people often needed more time to process things than I did (days, even! who knew?), it completely changed how I approached disagreements. Present me with new information, and I’ll likely assimilate it, assess it, and either accept it or be ready with a rebuttal before you’ve even finished your sentence. If I couldn’t immediately explain the rationale behind my position, it was indeed likely one didn’t exist. For other people, it might just mean they needed time for their brains to catch up. I started giving them that time.
Somewhat later, and very slowly, I started to realize that on a considerable portion of the occasions in which I believed I was being purely logical, I was actually being influenced by emotions that I wasn’t consciously perceiving. I had always been fully aware of my big emotions (and I had some really, really outsized emotions), but many of the subtle ones had been flying entirely under my radar for decades.
On a considerable portion of the occasions in which I believed I was being purely logical, I was actually being influenced by emotions that I wasn’t consciously perceiving.
Ironically, my fast thinking made me slow to catch on: rapid mental processing allowed me to react to my subconscious feeling and come up with a logical-sounding post hoc rationalization for my reaction in real time, fooling myself into believing that I’d been purely logical all along. For example, I might insist that — and could explain in great detail why — putting this particular small appliance in this particular place was the optimally efficient solution … when my true objection, hidden even from myself, was that I felt viscerally uncomfortable when I found someone else had moved things from where I’d expected them to be.[1]
Discovering the irrational emotions underlying my own behavior — and learning that it was not possible to just stop feeling them on demand — was the beginning of the end of my glorification of logic. My study of psychology and related fields helped me accept that irrational emotions are intrinsically human, and having them doesn’t automatically make you a terrible person. It added some gray into my initially rather black-and-white worldview, and — along with dozens of similar revelations — much improved my relationships with other people.
It would not be inaccurate to say that I spent the second twenty-five years of my life learning how not to be an asshole.
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The relationship between autism and assholery
There is a frustratingly widespread public perception that asshole behavior is a defining feature of autism, the inevitable outward manifestation of autistics’ supposed inability to feel empathy for other people.
Neither of those things are accurate: the vast majority of autistic people do possess empathy and also manage not to be assholes most of the time. But for some time now I’ve had this nagging feeling that to insist there is zero connection between assholery and autism would be missing … something.
When Elon Musk came out as autistic on Saturday Night Live in May 2021, I was embedded in autistic spaces on both Facebook and Twitter. Essentially no one in those virtual rooms was surprised by this announcement — Musk is one of a number of prominent Silicon Valley types whose autism seems blindingly obvious, especially to other autistics.
But the reactions to his publicly claiming the ‘Aspergers’ label showed a hard split. I’d estimate that maybe 10%-15% reacted with “hooray, this shows that autistic people can be super-successful, what an inspiration” while the other 85%-90% of us made Munch scream faces and went “no no no this is horrible,” because we recognized that his self-identification would only end up reinforcing the public conception of autistics as self-absorbed, egotistical asshats who treated other people like trash.
But it wasn’t until the moment where I drew the connection to my young adult self that I could clearly perceive the autism-to-asshole pipeline. In my twenties I was in fact already in the early stages of what I will call Autistic Asshole Syndrome.
It was an appalling realization, like seeing a bullet lodge itself in the wall next to your head, a goosebump shiver of “there but for grace go I.” Elon Musk is a deeply unhappy person, and I would not want to be him for all the money in the world.
Tracing backward, the events and decisions that sent me down a different psychological path from Musk all seem to converge on just two points: gender and wealth.
One, gender
Hans Asperger called the autistic boys he studied ‘little professors’. Decades later, Dr. Judith Gould observed that by contrast, autistic girls tended to be ‘little psychologists’. While autistic men have been gravitating to Silicon Valley, the mostly-undiagnosed autistic women have been disproportionately choosing fields that involve studying how humans think, interact, and communicate: counseling, research psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, social work, neuroscience. Even the ones who don’t do it professionally are frequently like me, with a driving curiosity — an autistic ‘special interest’ — about human psychology that persists for decades.
Autistic women, it turns out, have a lot more social motivation than autistic men:
Girls with autism often crave friendships, and have a strong need to belong to a social group. Boys with autism are often content playing alone, with no overt efforts to join in social games. Research from 2016 showed that autistic girls showed similar social motivation and friendship quality to non-autistic girls, whereas boys with autism reported less motivation for social contact relative to boys without autism and girls both with and without autism (Sedgewick et al., 2016).
Following on from this theory, the apparently increased social motivation in girls would presumably impact upon the development of social skills and social cognition… The more social experience you get, the better a social creature you become. In contrast, if a male with autism doesn’t have high social motivation and a need to socialise, he won’t develop the skills as successfully because he simply won’t have as many social experiences or be as interested in them when he does.
I am deeply skeptical of the idea that this gender difference is genetically determined. I think it’s much more likely to be a function of the fact that society demands a whole different level of social skills from girls, starting at a very young age. Girls get punished, by both peers and adults, for the very same autistic traits that are tolerated — and sometimes even celebrated — in boys. The world forces autistic girls to step up their game and adapt to the allistic majority’s idea of empathy — and in the process, exerts a protective effect against falling into Autistic Asshole Syndrome.[2]
Two, wealth
The role that wealth plays is more subtle, because it’s not about what money can buy you or the available standard of living. It’s more intangible than that.
My family was never wealthy, but I experienced a moderate amount of economic privilege growing up, including intermittent financial assistance from one of my parents through college and into my early twenties.
Remember this paragraph, from before?
I achieved early professional success in my chosen field: I won a regional writing contest at age seventeen, and a national award at age twenty-three. I was accepted into a community of professional authors, a network that led to several subsequent commissions and short fiction sales. I sat on convention panels where strangers came up afterward to gush over something of mine they’d read. I went to parties where literary agents who had read my work sought me out and courted me. One of the most famous authors in the world, someone who to this day has a name to conjure with, made a specific point of praising my talent and encouraging my career.
Conspicuously absent from this story is any mention of concurrent setbacks or rejections or failures. That’s not because they didn’t happen, but because at the time they didn’t factor significantly into my self-narrative. I was able to shrug them off, focus on the successes, and keep working towards my goal. That ongoing level of resilience was only possible because the Bank of Dad stepped in and kept the most major mistakes and misfortunes from having devastating impacts on my life.
This connection only became clear to me after years of living without that safety net. At twenty-five, having realized how toxic my relationship with my father still was, I chose estrangement. From that point, every setback had deeper repercussions in my life. And as they accumulated, my options narrowed.
People tend to either ignore or forget this, but Musk has failed a lot more than he’s succeeded. But every time, his financial resources cushioned the impact of those failures on his life (and, probably, his ego). The biggest gift of wealth, I think, is an unlimited number of opportunities to keep trying.
If my savant talent had been in a STEM field instead of linguistic, I likely could have built my own financial safety net; our society is happy to shovel money at people with skills in tech or engineering. But sadly for me, a precocious talent for writing did not set me up for actually making a living. (Vanishingly few creative writers ever do, and usually only after years of rapid, consistent output.) Most authors I knew paid the bills with another, often unrelated career, and they were full of advice on how to shoehorn the writing of a novel into the interstices between work and home life.
So that was the goal I set: bootstrap myself into a successful full-time career in the brand-new field of web design and negotiate my numerous complex and dramatic personal relationships, all while simultaneously completing a brilliant and award-winning novel.
That is not at all what transpired.
Act Two: Cumulative middle-aged struggles
Instead, the older I got, and the more I tried to do, the more I started running into real-world difficulties that I couldn’t compensate for.
I did make some progress in my personal life: I managed to find one partner who would be worth keeping — and also do enough work on myself, before and during, that he was willing to keep me. But the first dozen years of that relationship were still an emotional rollercoaster that required a great deal of energy and attention … including the unplanned and extremely challenging development of becoming stepmother to two young children.
And although I did manage to make something of a career in tech, it was a very rocky road. I couldn’t keep any job for more than a year or two, and — lacking any awareness of my autism or learning disabilities — I couldn’t figure out why. My exhaustion level climbed until it was so debilitating I became nearly certain I had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.[3] Every day felt like frantic dog-paddling, nose barely above water and no shore in sight.
By my early thirties, my self-image as ‘the brilliant prodigy who would swiftly overcome her traumatic origins and soar to greatness’ was in tatters. I could no longer fail to acknowledge that there were hard limits to my physical and mental stamina. A great deal of my energy was captured by the ongoing struggle to bring in enough money to pay the bills; the only choice I truly had was what to do with the remainder. And functionally speaking, I’d been making that choice every day for years: I’d repeatedly chosen my partner, his family, and my other relationships over my fiction writing.
So instead of continuing to fight a losing battle, or wallowing in bitterness, I worked on accepting that choice: on being content with the life that I had, rather than the life I had imagined. I mothballed my novel-writing ambition, let go of my self-image as the brilliant young writer, and deliberately stitched my threadbare self-worth to the goal of being a good, kind person and loving partner.
By my early thirties, my self-image as ‘the brilliant prodigy who would swiftly overcome her traumatic origins and soar to greatness’ was in tatters.
It helped that I had continued to add shades of gray into my formerly black-and-white perspective. This included moving toward not only a more realistically humble assessment of my own intelligence, but also a much more nuanced idea of what intelligence even means, along with the knowledge that the ways that we measure it are discriminatory and flawed. And I learned to value many other qualities — in myself and others — as much or more as any sort of intellect.
The professional setbacks also had a silver lining: in addition to moderating my overweening ego, they provided me with a front row seat for observing that meritocracy in our society is a myth. I had scrupulously played by the rules, but the result was nothing like what I had been told to expect. Being smart and working hard did not inevitably — or, looking around me, even often — lead to success. I wanted to know why the fuck not.
So I started studying economics, both traditional and behavioral. Behavioral economics is like the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of social science — “you got your psychology in my economics” — so of course I took to it like a duck to water.[4] I spent several years hyperfixated on the field, and came out the other side with a substantially different overall worldview.
One thing behavioral economists have extensively studied is what wealth and privilege do to people’s attitudes and behavior. It’s not good! For example, in this TEDx video, you can see clips from a now-famous Monopoly experiment at UC Berkeley. With the flip of a coin, researchers assigned one of each pair of gamers to the ‘rich and privileged’ condition, with more starting cash, a die-rolling advantage, and a higher salary when passing Go. They made no secret of the fact that they were literally rigging the game.
Unsurprisingly, these players cleaned the clocks of their ‘poor and disadvantaged’ partners. Yet when talking afterward about their success, the rich players tended to ignore the obvious role of luck and unfair resource access, instead ascribing their success to their own decisions during gameplay.[5]
When I won that big writing award in 1992, with its six thousand dollar prize, I barely spared a moment to consider the luck factor — to wonder whether I’d have won (or even made the first cut) against a different set of contestants in 1991 or 1993. I never thought at all about my resource advantage — how many other people might be equally talented, but more constrained in time or money or health, and who therefore never applied.
Biography of a young genius, alternate universe version
In a world where I had a bit more privilege — an ongoing financial safety net, a Y chromosome — I would almost certainly been much more successful across the years between twenty-five and fifty … at least in the ways that society usually measures success: in fame and fortune.
But under society’s expectations for males, it’s highly unlikely that I would have developed a lifelong hyperfocus on the human mind. My self-awareness would have remained rudimentary, and I would not have been forced to reckon with or even acknowledge most of my own psychological flaws and failings.
The bullying I experienced from my peers as a boy might have been less about elaborate social traps and public humiliation, and more about being shoved down a flight of stairs, but it still would have hurt, and I would have lacked the knowledge to refine my initial impression of other people as inexplicable, illogical, and cruel. I can so easily see myself, in that case, choosing to double down on my intellectual superiority: deciding it didn’t matter what anyone else thought, because I was smarter than all of them.
Cushioned by wealth, unaffected by sexism, my internal self-narrative would have remained unchallenged as I moved through the adult world. I would have assumed that meritocracy was working as intended, that my failures were unimportant and my success was both inevitable and deserved.
The more material success I had, the more people would idolize me, making it ever easier to dismiss anyone who criticized my behavior. Even though my personal relationships would remain a raging trash fire, my conviction that I was a rarified being of logic and genius would allow me to discount any complaints my successive partners might present.
As the world’s richest individual in a society which leans so heavily on the great man theory, I might have come to believe that nothing less than the survival of humanity itself depended on me. Eventually, this runaway feedback loop of unchecked ego could lead to some really weird and dangerous ideologies, like longtermism and pronatalism. Maybe even — though I hate to think it — the conviction that I should buy Twitter.
Postlude
Ironically for a narrative that so often mentions my native talent for writing, crafting this essay has been like wrestling with a sackful of oiled eels. I’ve spent literally weeks trying to turn that flash of insight, and some small subset of the associated backstory and context, into any kind of externally coherent form; it’s still too damned long and yet I cut so very much out.
In the meantime, another autistic writer I admire was independently coming to many of the exact same conclusions, and writing an essay describing the same phenomenon … arguably with more clarity and better organization. He also chose different details to expound upon than I did, so it’s definitely worth a read if you find the subject at all interesting.
Researching, composing, and sourcing informative essays like this one require many, many hours of unpaid work. If you appreciate it and can afford to, please help me continue writing with a paid subscription at the Member or True Fan levels. Or you can leave a one-time, pay-what-you-can tip. Thank you for your support!
Interoceptive deficit, alexithymia, and difficulties with unfulfilled predictions: all clues to my autism. ↩︎
Such pressures are in play for members of any marginalized group, although the details may differ. Black men, for example, may not have to worry about whether they appear sufficiently empathic and nurturing, but instead whether their autistic traits are misinterpreted as threats. ↩︎
In fact, ME/CFS remained my leading theory right up until my Autism Epiphany in 2019 turned up a better answer. Turns out no, ridiculous exhaustion is just the cost of constant autistic masking. ↩︎
Yep, another reference to 1970s TV commercials. Apparently this is a thing I do. ↩︎
The end of Piff’s TEDx talk leans heavily on billionaire philanthropy as a fix for runaway inequality. For a whole other essay’s worth of reasons (including some of his own research!), I know this to be fatally misguided. So while I appreciate what Piff’s research has taught us about the problems, I am convinced we have to look elsewhere for solutions. ↩︎