I’m friends with people who used to be gigantic musk fans (and they’ve fortunately gone in the opposite direction since then), and the vocal tics are absolutely something they mythologized — I vividly remember one of them cooing over how adorable his stutter is during the original cybertruck/neuralink announcement way back, which they of course insisted we watch live

and as someone who’s struggled with mild to severe vocal tics and other difficulties verbally communicating off and on for decades: I’m not an expert, but it’s real fucking weird he can turn the tics off when he needs to for an interaction. for example, during the Twitter space when an ex-Twitter engineer surprised him and called him out for making shit up about Twitter’s infrastructure, he instantly went from “shy mess” to “the worst executive you’ve ever met is trying to get you fired” — all steel, no stutter, an entirely different persona designed to make musk feel like he won that interaction. and if I were in that spot (and thank fuck I never will be that big an asshole), I’d be a fucking mess — that kind of stress makes me stutter, fuck up my phrasing, and talk in weird loops right away. I get a lot less confident as my brain overanalyzes what I’m saying.

and again everyone’s different and I’m not an expert, but it’s real weird the guy’s pattern is the exact opposite of myself and essentially everyone else I know who struggle with speaking under pressure. to be honest, I’m fairly certain the richest boy in the world can afford a vocal coach — and I’m also convinced he paid that vocal coach to sound like more of an adorable, vulnerable, relatable nerd