Alan Zendell, March 31, 2025

Elon Musk is a complicated individual. He’s a genius whose self-confidence knows no limit. He has bold ideas and an impressive record of accomplishments. He also suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, which he revealed when he hosted Saturday Night Live in 2021 in his opening monologue: “I reinvented electric cars, and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”

In 2022, during an interview with Axios, Musk talked about how growing up with Asperger’s shaped him. He is aware that his inability to recognize social cues makes communication difficult for him, and people are often offended by his remarks or tweets. On the other hand, his disorder also enables him to focus with an obsessive intensity most of us cannot match, enabling him to do things like spend entire nights studying advanced physics, because he is determined to understand how the universe works.

To the rest of us, Musk is a guy who appears single-mindedly fixated on getting what he wants and who seems incapable of feeling empathy for other people. He is pragmatic in everything he does, and his autism enables him to take cold-blooded actions in ways most of us couldn’t. In his role as the driving force behind DOGE, a fake government agency created by Donald Trump as a fundamental challenge to the checks and balances in our Constitution, he appears completely insensitive to the collateral damage he causes. When thousands of people lose their jobs and millions lose access to critical services they depend on, Musk chalks it up as the cost of progress without batting an emotional eye.

When most of us act in a way that causes others pain, even when we feel justified, we still pay an emotional price. People like Musk and Donald Trump don’t. Lack of concern for other people is equally characteristic of Musk’s autism and Trump’s sociopathy. But while we know Trump is primarily driven by greed and lust for power, what drives Musk is complicated. And it’s important to acknowledge that autistic geniuses, even when they believe they act with good intentions are prone to committing colossal errors.

Musk seems to revel in wielding his chainsaw when he trashes government agencies. He’s clearly having fun, although we also have to remember that fun doesn’t mean the same thing to people with Asperger’s as it does to the rest of us, and assuming we know what’s in his mind is a mistake. He loves being characterized as “mercurial,” but that gives his image a playful aspect that’s patently false. There is nothing playful about Elon Musk. He is deadly serious about everything he does.

The question is, what is his real motivation? I do not believe Musk is evil, but that doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous. He doesn’t think the way we do, which means his real intentions can be easily lost in translation. Despite all that, I  think Musk’s motivation is pretty clear, although his multi-tasking brain surely has more than one.

Many cosmologists and astrophysicists believe the long-term survival of humanity depends on finding another place to live. There’s a consensus in the scientific community that the possibility of a catastrophic astronomical event that could destroy life on Earth is more a matter of When than If. Such events are rare, but we know they have occurred in Earth’s past, and on an astronomical time scale, they appear inevitable.

Many scientists and visionaries like Musk believe that colonizing Mars is critical to assuring that humanity will not be wiped out the way the dinosaurs were. That’s a very real thing, not just a sci-fi story line, although it seems impossibly remote and unlikely to most people. And while many, myself included, share that belief, Musk has the singular ability to act on it.

Musk’s motivation, beyond accumulating wealth, is his belief that he will be humanity’s savior. He is not a Trump loyalist – he is every bit as transactional as Trump is, and he is using Trump’s dependence on financial support to take over NASA and redirect its focus away from anything that doesn’t support his goal to colonize Mars. To do that, he will have to monopolize NASA contracts worth billions of dollars. That will reinforce his status as the world’s richest man, but for Musk, that’s almost beside the point.

Musk couldn’t care less about government efficiency any more than Trump does. For Trump, dismantling government agencies is about killing things he despises. For Musk it may simply about believing he’s capable of saving humanity from destruction. He may destroy the lives of a lot of people in that quest, but he believes he’s doing the right thing.

Musk isn’t entirely wrong, but he cannot be allowed to enable Donald Trump’s efforts to transform our government and undermine the Constitution, even if he believes he’s responding to a higher calling.