Intelligence has diminishing returns. Not enough, and that is a problem, but as you get more it becomes worth less and less by itself. The most valuable commodity in our economy is productive attention. A dude with a 105 IQ who "grinds" 16 hours a day will out-compete a dude with a 130 IQ who has a million ideas and thoughts, but can't grind them to reality. Of course someone who is high in both, can become Elon Musk.
It's not intelligence. I've found too smart of people typically prophesize as an intellectual exercise rather than feeling the "I have to do something or I'm a failure so let's get building" of the lesser IQ's.
I will be honest, even if I would inherit a fortune 2x as large I would still not be able to achieve what that guy has done. Impressive regardless of any inherited ‘privilege’. Sure he is a little weird but who isn’t.
I think Elon is a shit person, and deserves tons of scrutiny, but this line of attack is not really true.
It's hard to square the idea that he inherited all that money with his life in Canada as a student, where by all accounts he was living with a lot of debt, paycheck to paycheck.
I think it's fair to say he was well off enough that he knew he had a nice fallback if he took some risk. He may not have actually been getting checks from his parents but I'm sure he had a nice inheritance coming.
What is your definition of success? What is your definition of morals?
Parent probably means something like “become a billionaire through hostile takeovers” and “interpersonal applied empathy, conscientiousness, and compassion.”
> Elon Musk was definitely privileged, but he built himself up.
Mostly he got lucky that his early crappy company got acquired by Paypal, and then he won the Paypal lottery. The Musk story is about 70% right-place-right-time, 25% great salesmanship and 5% actual engineering genius.
Keep in mind this is a guy who thinks a billion dollar explosive vacuum tube[0] is a better idea than... a train.
I think Musk is both an engineer but also a great salesman. The stupid tube is the salesman part...
A lot of people won the paypal lottery, also other lotteries...if you keep winning the lottery(paypal, starlink, tesla, spaceX) maybe it's not a lottery after all. Few have driven a handful of companies to success like he did.
That being said, it's hard to trust the guy, because you never know when it's the salesman or the engineer making the pitch. Also, I wouldn't want to work for him.
> The Musk story is about 70% right-place-right-time, 25% great salesmanship and 5% actual engineering genius
It's just so hard for me to believe this when he's had 3 successful companies. At that point he's making his own luck. I'd put the numbers at 20% luck for being able to attend expensive schools, 65% salesmanship for getting people into EVs and rockets and being a huge persona on twitter, and 15% being good at listening to the engineers he hires and getting the most out of them.
If a billion people put all their money on a single number on roulette five times in a row, we wouldn't call the three that won geniuses as a result.
Meritocracy is a myth. billionaires are no better at the awful game of trying to exploit others than the millions of others with privilege, intelligence, drive, and the willingness to do anything to anyone no matter how awful to make line go up. They're just the ones that won.
You don't have to make your own luck when you're a billionaire - everyone else will make it for you. Anything Elon musk touches is instant investor catnip and he has a cult of true believers that chase any trend he offhandedly mentions. Evidence: look what happens to any shitcoin he tweets about.
