Todd

"Asperger's makes you a very difficult person," Grimes says. "He's not good at reading the room. His emotional comprehension is just very different from the average human." People should keep his psychological makeup in mind when judging him, she argues. "If someone has depression or anxiety, we sympathize. But if they have Asperger's we say he's an asshole." She learned to navigate the many modes of his personalities. "He has numerous minds and many fairly distinct personalities," she says. "He moves between them at a very rapid pace. You just feel the air in the room change, and suddenly the whole situation is just transferred over to his other state." She noticed that his different personalities had different tastes, even in music and decor. "My favorite version of E is the one who's down for Burning Man and will sleep on a couch, eat canned soup, and be chill." Her bete noire is the Elon that's in what she calls demon mode. "Demon mode is when he goes dark and retreats inside the storm in his brain." One night, when they were at dinner with a group, I watched as the clouds gathered and Musk's mood shifted. Grimes edged away from him. "When we hang out, I make sure I'm with the right Elon," she later explained. "There are guys in that head who don't like me, and I don't like them." "Sometimes one of the Elon versions will seem not to remember what another one has done. 'You will say stuff to him and then he'll just have no memory of it whatsoever, because he was in a brain space," Grimes says. "He's focused on a particular thing, he will not get stimulation, not consume any inputs from the outside world. Stuff can be right in front of his eyes and he won't see it. It's just like what happened when he was in grade school." In the 2018 emotional turmoil at Tesla, she tried to coax him to relax. "Everything doesn't need to suck," she told him one night. "You don't need to feel stoked about everything all the time." But he also understood, in ways that others did not, that his restlessness was a driver of his success. So, too, was his demon mode, though that took her a little longer to appreciate. "Demon mode causes a lot of chaos," she says, "but it also gets shit done." Source: Walter Isaacson's 'Elon Musk' (2023), chapter 49

What's even the point anymore