Aspie Supremacy Has a Grain of Truth and a Mountain of Ego

Mother Jones · PoliticsThe 4chan-coded ideology behind Elon Musk's war on normiesMusk thinks autism makes him superhuman. Just don't call it that.By Julia Métraux · Jun 4, 2025

But Asperger’s quickly came to be seen as an artificial distinction, and was dropped from the DSM

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In 2021, Elon Musk went on Saturday Night Live and told the audience he has Asperger's. Then he explained that he sometimes posts strange things, and that's just how his brain works.

That's not a disclosure. That's a terms of service. Accept it, and nothing he posts afterward is his fault.

In June 2025, Mother Jones ran a piece by Julia Métraux on what the autistic community calls "Aspie supremacy": the idea that a certain kind of autistic person, the "mild" kind, the kind who can probably code, is better than everyone else. Better than neurotypical people. Better than autistic people with higher support needs. Musk is the poster child.

I'm late to this one. I read it, agreed with most of it, and then kept arguing with the rest of it for longer than I'd like to admit. This is me finally having that argument somewhere other than the shower.

For the record, I'm autistic, I spent twenty-five years as an enterprise architect, and I have no interest in defending Elon Musk.

The parts they got right

Most of it, honestly.

Musk only reaches for the diagnosis when it's useful. The race science isn't autism. The salutes at the inauguration weren't autism. Misgendering his own daughter isn't autism, and given how many autistic people are trans or gender nonconforming, that one is especially rich. That's not how his brain works. That's just him.

The article includes a pyramid graphic of the Aspie supremacist worldview. Musk alone at the top, then the terminally online fanboys, then regular tech workers, then "normies," and at the bottom, autistic people with high support needs. It's funny because it's accurate. The people who build ladders like this always put themselves at the top and the people who need the most help at the bottom. Autistic people punching down at other autistic people has a name, lateral ableism, and it's ugly.

The late Mel Baggs named Aspie supremacy back in 2010, and the critique has held up. I have no quarrel with the central argument. Musk believes autism made him superhuman, and he believes he sits at the top of a hierarchy he made up.

My quarrel is with what the article does next.

The baby and the bathwater

The article treats the word "Asperger's" as part of the problem. Its case is fair. Hans Asperger sent disabled children to die under the Nazis. The DSM dropped the diagnosis in 2013. When it was in use, it was handed overwhelmingly to white boys from families who could afford an evaluation, while girls and kids of color went undiagnosed. And today the word often gets used to mean autistic, but not that autistic.

All true. I'll concede every bit of it.

But the word survived psychiatry dropping it because it was doing a job. "I'm autistic" tells you almost nothing. It covers someone who needs help with daily living and someone who has spent two decades designing distributed systems while quietly falling apart after every meeting. People needed a way to say which part of the territory they lived in, and Asperger's was the only label on the map.

A lot of people found themselves through that word. That's especially true for late-diagnosed adults, and many of them are self-diagnosed, which the autistic community broadly accepts as valid. It certainly was my path to an official diagnosis. Telling those people their entry point was tainted doesn't help them understand themselves. It just takes away the handle.

As for the skew in who got diagnosed, that's an argument for diagnosing everyone else. It isn't an argument for deleting the description. You don't fix a map that only shows one neighborhood by burning the map.

The problem was never the label. It's what people like Musk stacked on top of it.

The question they skipped

Here's what the article never asks: is any of it true?

It walks right up to the question. It cites Steve Silberman's 2001 Wired piece on "the geek syndrome." It mentions Microsoft's autism hiring program. It links an essay debunking the 10X programmer. Then it moves on, as if asking would be conceding something.

So I'll ask. Do some autistic traits fit certain kinds of technical work? In my experience, yes.

I don't understand a system from the slide deck. I understand it from the bottom up, by building a model out of what the parts actually do and how they actually fail. That's how I learned architecture, and it's why I'm good at it. The design document says one thing. The system does another. I'm the one who notices the disconnect. It’s also why the first few months at a job or project I have the biggest case of Imposter Syndrome. Until I can build that mental model I feel at sea.

Then there's monotropism, the tendency to pour all of your attention into one thing at a time. The rest of the world calls it a special interest. My employers called it deep work and paid me for it. When the special interest becomes the career, the obsessive focus that makes small talk impossible becomes a professional asset.

That's the grain of truth. Here's where the mountain of ego comes in.

Fit is not rank. A key that fits one lock isn't a better key. It's a key for that lock. Being well suited to designing systems doesn't make you better than a nurse, or a teacher, or an autistic person who can't work at all. It definitely doesn't qualify you to run the federal government with a team of twenty-somethings.

And look at who's wearing the jersey. Musk isn't the person doing the deep, bottom-up systems work. He's the guy on stage talking about it. The people who actually have these traits are the engineers, and plenty of them can't get through a phone screen because they don't make enough eye contact on video. The article cites an unemployment rate for autistic people of around 40 percent. If tech really rewarded us, that number would look different.

Musk also likes to call empathy a weakness, and his fans read that as an autistic trait. It isn't. Emotional connection is genuinely hard for me. I don't always know when someone is upset, and when I do, I don't always know what they need. That's not the same as not caring. Musk took a difficulty and turned it into a philosophy, which is a very convenient thing to do when you're the richest man alive.

Gifted, or just hidden?

There's a question underneath all of this that I can't answer, and I'm not sure anyone can. Is being gifted actually part of the Asperger's profile? Or is "gifted Aspie" just what lower or less visible support needs look like from the outside?

I have my suspicions. At work, people saw the architecture diagrams. They didn't see the executive function problems, the days lost to burnout, the social battery that runs out after one event, or the workarounds I've built for my workarounds. From the outside, gifted. From the inside, a lot of very quiet maintenance.

Now scale that up. Musk's support needs, whatever they are, are handled by assistants, chiefs of staff, and a few hundred billion dollars. Money is very good at hiding support needs. It's very easy to believe autism gave you superpowers when someone else is quietly doing all the parts it made hard.

The gifted Aspie might just be survivorship bias with a good assistant.

I'll leave that as a question. That's what the "mostly" in "mostly correct" is for.

Better vocabulary, not a better ladder

So where does that leave us? The supremacists want a ranking. The critics want the word gone. Neither offers a better way to describe what's actually going on.

That's why I built Spectrum Codex. The spectrum is usually pictured as a single line from "a little autistic" to "a lot autistic." It's closer to an equalizer with dozens of independent sliders: sound, touch, masking, social energy, executive function, special interests, and so on. Two people who both would have been labeled Asperger's can have almost nothing in common.

It borrows its format from the Geek Code, which early internet users put in their email signatures in the '90s to describe themselves in a single line of ASCII. Same idea, different identity.

A few design choices matter here. It's self-reported. Nobody hands you your code, and nobody scores it, which is the same reason self-identification matters. It's not a severity scale. And it's not a contest. There's no top of the pyramid, because there's no pyramid. Traits are dimensions, not superpowers or deficits. Some days a dimension is an asset, some days it's a wall.

Here's mine:

-----BEGIN SPECTRUM CODEX-----
Version: gamma
Ss+* Sl+ St+++ Sf++ Pn- M++ SE-- Cn--- Pr-- Sc-- Cv+ Ct+++ Cl+++ Cb-- SI++$ R++ EF- Sm+ B- Pt--- Sy+ Ob-- Sn+ AD++ PD+++ RS+ Dx:fl SM:ib CI:av Ag:10s
------END SPECTRUM CODEX------

The SI++$ is the special interest that became a career. The Cn--- is the empathy thing from earlier. The Sn+ says I need some support, which nobody at my last job would have guessed. And Pt--- says I'm an extreme big-picture thinker, which means I don't even fit the detail-obsessed Aspie stereotype. That's the point. The stereotype was always too small.

The grain and the mountain

There is a grain of truth in Aspie supremacy. Some autistic people are well suited to some technical work, for reasons that have to do with how we think. I've built a career on it.

Everything piled on top of that grain is ego. The ranking. The contempt for people with higher support needs. The idea that difficulty with empathy is a virtue. The belief that being good at one kind of work makes you fit to run everything else.

Musk can keep the mountain. Most of us just want a way to say how our brains work without being sorted onto a pyramid by either side.

We're working on that. Here's the code.