Elon is definitely highly intelligent but also exhibits the same 'tics' I see in other geeks and other members of our tribe. I see the same thing with Thiel.
They follow a very specific chain of reasoning, take them off the script and I expect they shall abruptly stop making sense unless you read the material around their ideas.
I think when you know a lot about anything it becomes difficult to communicate what precisely that is.
I mean Elon is miles better at it than most of us but I think he still also struggles to put himself across.
The other side of that is classic 'people' people can express themselves adroitly except there is not that much inside their heads worth explaining. People people tend to follow very lazy chains of reasoning, they hop, they skip, from premise to conclusion and then unto something barely related as if they were making sense, which of course they are not. If you don't follow some kind of thread it is not surprising that that emotions and intuitions would be your guiding lights, which for most people, they are. To me this is the critical distinction between geeks and non-geeks.
It is like an eternal Cassandra-like conundrum. You can know things correctly, or you can communicate them correctly, but not simultaneously (unless you employ some trick or fake it).
Perhaps I should be more specific. He doesn't appear to demonstrate a high level of executive function disorder(ADHD properly named), Dyslexia, or Dyscalculia. He also doesn't appear to have any specific perceptual disorders and by the rate he reads texts, I'd imagine his verbal IQ to be at least 3 standard deviations above the mean.
