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People tell Tony he’s a narcissist. He’s not. He would know, because he’s obsessed with himself.
He’s always been interested in the workings of his own mind, more than other people seem to think is entirely appropriate or healthy. He likes complex systems, and he’s the most complex system around. Plus, you know, pain avoidance, problem-solving, that sort of thing. If he knows some more about himself, maybe he can fix himself a bit.
He’s read the DSM (a lot of DSMs). He got ahold of a copy of the DSM-III when he was eleven and read it in a week. (Later versions, he’d read overnight; he was having a slow week.) It had some things that he found useful; bipolar disorder and attention deficit disorder both seemed like they might have some relevance. He ignored anything explicitly classified as a pediatric diagnosis, though (he was short and pre-pubescent, sure, but he was fairly certain he’d never been a kid, and certainly not anymore), and that meant he skated right past something that was then labelled as “infantile autism”.
On the whole, really, it didn’t seem all that helpful. Labels are all very well in their place, but none of these labels seemed to work very well. He decided that he was just too complicated for that sort of simplistic categorization and left it be. Whatever he was, it was clearly awesome, and he’d just go ahead and rock it.
(The DSM-5, now, that has some interesting things to say, but that's much later on.)
People think Tony likes computers and robots more than people, which has its merits as a theory, but isn’t strictly accurate. He’d say it’s more that computers and robots like him. He understands them, and they understand him.
By the time he was nine, he’d figured out that other humans didn’t always like him very much. Well, by that point he’d figured out that it was a pattern, that most people didn’t like him very much. He’d been clear on the concept of individual people not liking him for a long time.
He’d also figured out by then that electronics were pretty amazing. (Long before then.) And he’d figured out that when he made things, they responded to him in ways that actually made sense. Computers, machines, they follow very precise instructions; they don’t try to interpret, or do more or less than he says, or read things into what he says. They follow the instructions that he explicitly gives them, and nothing else.
Other people seem to have some trouble with that, with the specificity of it, the details. If you want a robot to go around an obstacle, you can’t say “go around”; you can maybe say “go forward until you reach an obstruction, turn left until your path is no longer obstructed, go forward until the obstruction is no longer at your right, turn right…” And the more you want to do, the more specific and clear and precise you need to be. Tony’s good at that. A lot better than other people are, most of the time. He’s good at getting machines to do what he wants. Machines work better for him than they do for other people.
When he's nine, he starts thinking that maybe, since computers like him more than humans do, a robot would be willing to be his friend. He starts designing one, that starts out human-shaped, like an android (it may have looked suspiciously like C-3PO, at first), but over time gets simplified down to just one arm. He doesn't have the knowledge and resources to build it for another seven years, but he keeps working on it that whole time, a drawer dedicated to Project Imaginary Friend in his desk. He builds smaller versions that he keeps as pets, six inches tall, scurrying around the floor. (Animals like him too. They make more sense than humans, too, though in a different way than computers. Howard's not a fan of them, though, so Tony's happy with his little bots.)
People say Tony Stark is like his father. Which is, unfortunately, true. It took Tony a lot longer than it should have to realize he was different from other people, because he wasn’t all that different from Howard. They had different interests, different habits, but their brains worked the same way.
They both had that complete focus that sometimes sent them into labs and workshops for days at a time. When Tony was little, they'd both work in Howard's workshop on opposite sides of the room. Tony would build computers or toasters or miniature rockets, Howard would build weapons or mess about with chemicals or, well, whatever it was he did. They wouldn't talk to each other, except for the occasional muttered request for a tool or part, which was passed over absently, without bothering to look up from the project at hand.
Once in a while, Tony'd ask Howard about something one of them was working on, and get a lengthy spurt of technobabble in response. Sometimes they'd end up babbling at each other, feeding back on each others' enthusiasm.
Those were good days. Sometimes, there were bad days, when Howard would scream and stamp around the house throwing things. Tony understood that. He's never done that, so much, himself; he's more likely to go quiet and still when things get too much. Stare off into the distance, unmoving except for his hands. He always has to have something in his hands. Sometimes, though, he'll go quiet, but also get that same destructive urge his father did, an itch inside, a blankness in front of his eyes, that drives him into something violent. He's destroyed his workshop that way a few times.
Tony catches himself fidgeting in a lot of the same ways his father used to; rolling tools between his hands, rubbing smooth metal. (They both tended to carry small pieces of scrap metal in their pockets to fiddle with.) There's a particular motion that Tony does with his hands, snapping them in rapid succession and then clapping one over the other, that he remembers Howard used to do when he was nervous in front of people but trying to look cocky. Tony likes the sound it makes anyway, regardless of where he originally heard it.
Howard taught Tony a lot of The Rules. The rules that other people all seemed to know automatically. Howard had figured out how to be "charming" and "disarming" a long time back, because it was useful, and it got him what he wanted, and he taught Tony some of how to do that too. Some Tony figured out on his own.
By the time Tony's grown, he's gotten good at it. He knows what to say and how to smirk and what buttons to push to control what people think about him. He still can't make people actually like him (Pepper and Rhodey and Bruce are flukes, statistical anomalies), so in order to keep control a lot of the time he runs with that, makes them dislike them in the ways he wants them to dislike him. He pokes at weak spots (he's always been good at finding weak spots) and projects arrogance in waves. He throws his issues in people's faces so they don't go digging to find them.
People say a lot of things about him. They generally don't realize that he said those things to them, first.