> He’s clearly not stupid but his lawyers must be sitting at their desks sobbing “stop giving interviews!”

TBH I don't think the interviews hurt him much, and I think more than likely they are a strategy trying to reduce his culpability. The common thread among all his interviews is "I'm really sorry for being such an idiot", basically trying to play stupid to make it difficult to prove intent.

I’d look at it from the other direction: how does an interview help him? Nothing he says is going to keep him out of a courtroom and he’ll have time to present his version there, so I’m not seeing any upside to potentially saying something which the prosecution can use, find a lead from, or simply point to as evidence of duplicity — immediately pivoting from “I’m a genius who’ll stabilize this out of control field” to “I had no idea what was going on and ignored my staff” just days after being caught is going to be a hard sell.

I was thinking something similar, that being intelligent doesn't mean you're smart, but I think "wisdom" says it better.

I won’t claim it’s an original idea but … wow, would I have snickered at an author for laying on too thick if he’d been a character in a novel.

Well, the other possibility is that he has high charisma and low intelligence.

I tend to use the classical definition of charisma - in which case his charisma stat is 0.