Temple Grandin Admires Elon Musk and Long Knew He Was on the Autism Spectrum

Professor Temple Grandin identifies as autistic and has written on what we can learn from the cognitively diverse. In the passages quoted below, she refers to the May 2021 Saturday Night Live hosted by Elon Musk in which he said he had Asperger’s syndrome.

(p. C7) I have always admired Elon Musk’s engineering of rockets and cars. I loved his cool space suits and how he made a rocket booster land upright. My must-read book is Walter Isaacson’s “Elon Musk.” Previously I had read Ashlee Vance’s book about Mr. Musk. It still has Post-it Notes stuck on it: I marked the pages that made me sure he was on the autism spectrum. I had to keep it to myself until he made his announcement on “Saturday Night Live.”

For the full review, see:

Temple Grandin. “12 Months of Reading: Temple Grandin.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, December 9, 2023): C7.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 8, 2023, and has the title “Who Read What in 2023: Leaders in Business, Science and Technology: Temple Grandin.”)

The Elon Musk books Temple Grandin praises are:

Isaacson, Walter. Elon Musk. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023.

Vance, Ashlee. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. New York: Ecco, 2015.

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