I can. When I look at extremely functional autistics like Elon Musk, the idea he has a condition which makes him diseased and disordered is absurd.
I think the natural reaction to that is that either diagnostic criteria should be narrowed and/or it should be possible for people to lose their diagnosis if they achieve Elon Musk levels of functioning.
-OR-
Autism should be viewed more neutrally, as people of a certain type who are more susceptible to disease or disorders but to not necessarily have them.
Do you have a personal relationship with the man? We're all well aware of his public persona but that has nothing to do with how it is to actually interact with him as a person. Or any other autistic person. Watch Hannah Gadsby: Nanette and realize that you don't see the failures, only the successes.
Elon Musk is highly functional but he also has a wide and deep support network unlike most other autistic people. He self immolates all the time and he's propped up by his great wealth. He self medicates with drugs. He has a team of people who handle his every need. When normal autistic people self immolate as such, they are cast from society forever - fired, locked up, abandoned, or even killed. And just because someone is high functioning today, it doesn't mean they will always be or always have been.
Not only that, consider the societal advantage of this behavior. Many social rules are wrong and group-level maladaptive. Having a subset of the population that doesn't adhere to those rules benefits society by allowing it to break out of local maxima.
It's not a tendency we should suppress. Punishing people for non-conformity is the act of a villain. And yet we do, so that only people with wealth can survive doing it.
Yet he functions well in niche circumstances, and he's currently in said circumstances and functioning. Not only that, most people would not be able to function as well as Musk in Musk's shoes.
Also, the absurdity isn't really Musk in a vacuum, it's him being in the same basket as people who can't complete any activities of daily living. He might actually be more similar to quite a few people with ADHD than quite a few people with level 3 autism. It's very strange and incoherent even.
This is, by the way, all a result of what a mess of a taxonomy the DSM and ICD are.
I think the natural reaction to that is that either diagnostic criteria should be narrowed and/or it should be possible for people to lose their diagnosis if they achieve Elon Musk levels of functioning.
-OR-
Autism should be viewed more neutrally, as people of a certain type who are more susceptible to disease or disorders but to not necessarily have them.