I want to talk about the psychology of Elon Musk and why he's doing what he does.

[meadowlander]

1. I'd add to this from an autistic perspective -

with the usual qualification that not all autistic people are alike but many do share some common characteristics.

Need for control - many autistic people feel constantly overwhelmed by their environments and strive to achieve a situation where they can control all of the variables up to the extent of their means. Elon has a lot of means, so he is seeking to control a lot of variables. He will quit completely rather than not be in complete control.

Obsessive pattern recognition - many autistic brains are wired to find obscure connections in massive sets of data. This is what attracts Elon to AI - if he can gather all the data, he thinks he can find something in it that nobody else can. Many autistic people are also attracted to conspiracy theories like catnip because it involves chewing through a lot of information to glean the most obscure possible truth. Spending all day on Twitter marinating in this bullshit has largely broken Elon's brain.

All consuming special interests - once they find one of these, many autistic people will seek to learn everything they possibly can about them and will forgo sleeping, eating and relationships in their quest for total expertise. They will go about acquiring this information in a spikey, inconsistent, trees rather than forest way, deep diving into particularly areas of interest instead of attacking knowledge acquisition systematically. They prefer to be self-taught, following their interests, instead of listening to a teacher. Unfortunately, Elon has decided our government is his special interest for now and is starting with the social security code instead of "how a bill becomes a law".

Preference for logic and efficiency over human relationships - autistic people can be great at cutting through the bullshit and getting to the core issue as well as finding the most efficient way to solve a problem. The considerations of other people (and particularly their feelings) are secondary. In some ways, some autistic people struggle with feeling real and with acknowledging the reality of other peoples' existence. He's not a sadist getting off on firing people. They simply don't have any intrinsic value for him in the face of the potential to make a system work as efficiently as possible. Although he does potentially get off a bit on taking petty revenge on regulators who have made his life difficult in the past.

Not caring about material possessions is also an autistic thing. I suspect if he was dead broke and still had the opportunity he would forgo a salary to keep doing what he is doing. He is driven by his ego - to be the smartest person in the room, the one in charge, and the one with the answers nobody else has.