Musk would later talk abouteven joke abouthaving Aspergers, a common name for a form of autism-spectrum disorder that can affect a persons social skills, relationships, emotional connectivity, and self-regulation. He was never actually diagnosed as a kid, his mother says, but he says he has Aspergers, and Im sure hes right. The condition was exacerbated by his childhood traumas. Whenever he would later feel bullied or threatened, his close friend Antonio Gracias says, the PTSD from his childhood would hijack his limbic system, the part of the brain that controls emotional responses. As a result, he was bad at picking up social cues. I took people literally when they said something, he says, and it was only by reading books that I began to learn that people did not always say what they really meant. He had a preference for things that were more precise, such as engineering, physics, and coding.

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson