I do think his emotional growth was retarded or completely stopped around the ages of 10-14 years old. It’s a valid use of the word in his case.

Like if you look at how most billionaires since the 80s came into being its almost entirely one strategy:

1. start with a decent pile of money

2. Put the money pile on a stock market bet

3. Manipulate the stock price by lying, cheating, stealing or making a popular product.

Elon musk is some kind of idiot-savant in manipulating stock prices and then diverting a maximal amount of money away from material product creation. His "money taken" to "physical product created" ratio is just modestly better than elizabeth holmes.

There is a larger discussion to be had of whether we should allow society to give people that level of power because they're good at marketing and backroom dealing. Especially since the entire reason we created the entire stock market system was in theory to build more popular products, not to reward skilled stock market manipulators.

Its sort of salt in the wound that the material value of most of elon's companies and products are largely dwarfed by the amount of money musk has been awarded by the government.

Society would probably have been better served by spinning up state owned electric car factories and state owned satellite delivery systems because we could have gotten all the same benefits for a fraction of the price we paid for it and are continuing to pay for.

Ketamine melted his brain. He was always a loser but not to such an extent.