I'll contort like this.

Elon clearly has a history of some very bad and capricious behavior toward employees and others. Yet at the same time he's almost single handedly led efforts to revolutionize both space flight and electric vehicles and these efforts have been largely successful.

The EV one is probably the most impactful here on Earth. I highly doubt we would be seeing the EV revolution if it weren't for Tesla. Tesla doesn't make the majority of EVs globally and there's a chance Tesla may even fail, but they validated the market and pushed all the older car companies into it. Before Tesla EVs were dismissed as un-marketable and the discourse around transport centered on how we would lose mobility once we ran out of oil (remember The Oil Drum?).

Steve Jobs was similar to Elon in many ways: apparently very capricious and critical and hard to work with, the sort of leader who is prone to firing people in elevators over throw-away comments. Yet Steve Jobs put Apple on a path to becoming for a time the most valuable company in the world and almost single handedly led a revolution in personal computing design, computer hardware industrial design, and of course mobile computing.

Similar personality allegations have even been made against Martin Luther King including infidelity and aggression toward inferiors. Frank Lloyd Wright was so abusive to his staff one of them committed mass murder. It seems to hold in other fields too.

If you think these people are horrible narcissistic assholes, the question that must be asked is: why do we need a narcissist asshole to drive progress? It's clear to me at least when looking at both business and larger human history that we as a species do not progress without someone like this leading the charge.

I have my own pet hypothesis on this that I've posted before.

Human beings are wired for hunter gatherer or very simple agricultural existence. We are wired for a vastly slower pace of life with few large opportunities for advancement. Most of the people who lived all the way up until very recently never encountered a large opportunity in their environment. This environment selected for patience, slow thinking, and eusociality.

The modern world is fast and full of large opportunities for advancement both individually and as a group or species. From the perspective of this world we are all wired for a state of low-grade depression and anhedonia. Compared to our modern environment the average human being is practically catatonic.

But there are freaks. There are people who are wired for this level of speed and abundance. These are manics, bipolars (in their mania state), high-functioning non-violent psychopaths, some high-functioning autistics, etc.

Unfortunately these freaks are outliers and as such are not broadly well-adapted. This often includes being socially maladapted. Most of the ones I'm familiar with are either borderline asocial ("autists" in modern pop psychology slang) or are narcissistic abusive personalities who compensate for their social mal-adaptation by wielding a battering ram.

Sometimes these people do teach themselves to be socially more well adjusted, but these are outliers among the outliers.

These people tend to be freakishly effective in the modern world as long as they don't go mad or end up dead or in jail. As evidence for this hypothesis I submit Donald Trump. He does not seem particularly intelligent, is not educated, and alienates and angers almost everyone around him, yet he's executed the "become rich" maneuver multiple times and has vaulted himself into the Presidency. By executing the get rich maneuver multiple times I mean he went bankrupt multiple times and then got at least somewhat rich (though how rich is up for debate) again. How is he able to do this? He's hyper-motivated. I think that's the beginning and end of the explanation. You don't need to be smart, or graceful, or socially skilled, only to have a dopamine system cranked to eleven.

Elon and Steve Jobs have the added benefits of actually being very good at something. This helps, but it's not the qualifier. The necessary condition is sustainable dopamine overdrive, a "stable genius" in Trumpspeak. You can be an idiot and succeed with that... again provided you avoid madness, death, or jail.

I'll give you another data point. A therapist once told me a story of someone who went into an extreme manic episode, moved to Detroit, recruited a group of hip hop artists, and founded a record label. This man was a white guy from the suburbs with no experience in either hip hop or the record industry and didn't even sing or play a musical instrument. I doubt this label was successful, but even getting that far with zero expertise in a short period of time is astounding. If he managed to find a great artist there is some chance he could have been successful. Let that sink in.

Since most human beings today exist in (by modern standards) low-grade depression, we sort of use these freaks and outliers to drive us forward. We also borrow some of their freakish hyper-motivation via the mirror neuron effect.

The alternative to being led by and mirroring a hyper-driven freak seems to be stimulants. There's the ever-popular caffeine, both legal and illegal sources of amphetamine, ritalin, and SSRIs which are really a special type of stimulant. I propose that so many people are on these drugs because they are attempting to function in an environment that moves at a pace far beyond what evolution tuned us to cope with. Unfortunately many of these have negative side effects, especially the really strong ones. Heavy amphetamine use can temporarily adapt one to modernity, but it doesn't last long and leaves one with addiction and burn-out.

The freaks seem permanently tuned to this pace at the expense of their social and emotional sanity. They can operate in the modern world at their full potential without drugs, but in so doing they often alienate virtually everyone around them and sometimes go insane. In Elon's case (and judging from his Twitter feed) I hope Starlink comes up and Starship flies before he ends up like Howard Hughes.

I can't take full credit for this. I originally encountered a version of this hypothesis in the writings of Robert Anton Wilson, and I believe he was referencing either Timothy Leary or Aldous Huxley.