But didn't all those people you list fail at the end of the day?
Bill Gates is not just unfaithful, he even considered slipping his wife STD medication to avoid having to talk about his state of affairs. He's now alone and the only people willing to care for him are probably very few old friends he didn't alienate, yet. The rest is just after his money.
Steve Jobs was an infamously bad father and husband, just as Elon Musk and they both suffered from it. Elon Musks own daughter is attacking him online. Think about that.
Elon Musk is on top of that a seriously pathetic individual. That is pretty obvious, isn't it.
Sam Altman ... I mean, just the accusations are so cringe and ignominious.
None of those people strike me as authentically happy and fulfilled. They all overstepped the mark and paid for it dearly or are in the process of doing so. They all suffered from their habits of being reckless and lacking compassion.
If failing for you means being broke or "not rich", then yes. But that would be a very narrow interpretation. Certainly not mine. I seriously pity all of them.
Steve Jobs was certainly flawed and his personal relationships extremely complicated, but I would recommend reading the memoir his daughter wrote, Small Fry as it provides a more firsthand, nuanced perspective into Jobs as a father and partner. Compared to Elon, Steve would be father of the year.
Their companies are all doing well (although I think the jury is out on OpenAI). So did they fail? Graham seems to measure a person's success by the success of their company.
You're probably right. But then he is wrong anyway. Almost all the famous founders of the most successful companies the US produced are or have been infamously mean. Sometimes they had more likeable co-fouders like Paul Allen or Wozniak, but his little opinion piece falls flat nonetheless. He is contradicting himself in his own self-righteous thought bubble. I just chose not to participate.
It's PG, the definition of the sort of success he advocates in the startup world is "accumulated a lot of money, influence and kudos" and those guys are outlying successes in those areas, regardless of issues in their personal life and how many people detest some of them.
Sure, there are normies with greater levels of personal happiness (as well as plenty of nice normies who also managed to fall out with significant people in their lives for one reason or another), but I don't think PG is likely to consider them higher achievers, even if they're significantly more secure and happy in their career than some of those individuals.
>Elon Musks own daughter is attacking him online. Think about that.
If you read Walter Isaacson's book on Musk it's pretty clear that his kids do love him, he does care for them well, and that his "daughter" fell into pretty extremist ideology.
Look her up on TikTok, she’s not mentally well. Extreme leftist ideology is what I’m talking about.
You should read the book, it’s pretty good. Isaacson is not at all biased towards Musk, he has a lot of critical things to say about him. The author is one of the most trusted and thorough biographers of his generation and is known for extensive primary-source research.
This verge article is cope, they are a very politically biased organization. Linking to them is the equivalent of me linking to Fox News and trying to pass it off as unbiased.
Also, those are not scare quotes. His “daughter” is a man pretending to be a woman because of mental illness and extremist ideology.
It doesn’t seem that leftist to me. Are you a shrink? Or are you using some kind of folk diagnosis to determine she’s mentally unwell?
What kind of ideology strips individuals of the right of self determination to live and be called whatever they want? That’s what most civilized people call extreme.
Can you give an example of “valid” scare quotes? Or a definition even?
IMO, Isaacson isn't the most objective biographer and his sourcing tends to be pretty awful. I don't trust anything he's written about contemporary people and I'm still disappointed that the access Steve Jobs gave him was seemingly squandered.
That may well be. I'm also extrapolating from what I read about his upbringing. That's pretty extreme. He was severely abused by his father (possibly even sexually) and bullied by his peers. His "superpower" is an insatiable desire to proof something forever. Also asking Epstein (post-conviction) for an invitation to a wild party on his island is allowing for conclusions that are hardly flattering. And I mean that in a way that is orthogonal to happiness.
Bessel van der Kolk also mentions in his excellent book "The Body keeps the Score" that the effect of antidepressants is correlated with the source of the depression. If the depression is a comorbidity from early childhood trauma then antidepressants are limited due to trauma-related reshaping of how the brain is organized. Cases like yours or those that a related to traumatic experiences as an adult are more the result of a shallow neurochemical imbalance which antidepressants are able to impact beneficially.
the author almost realizes that hiring cheap talent is like looking for a stock to invest in ... the trick is to identify undervaluation. then he shortstops and overvalues the usual metrics like low age just as everybody else. some people miss the forest for the trees.
More charitably, someone who is older and exceptional has probably had a chance to find equilibrium with the market, i.e. they know exactly how much they are worth and as a little startup you're less likely to end up landing them.
Wayne Knight aka Newman was - as far as I can tell - the most successful regular cast member from Seinfeld with respect to a movie career outside of that show.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus? (Although looking at her filmography, it turns out that four of the movies I’d seen were where she’s had big roles in were just in the last three years.
fun fact: her father is billionaire. i guess that predisposes an acting inclined person to take a risk like seinfeld but keeps you from being hungry enough to walk hard.
The Remmos and al-Zeins are probably thinking about that already, but as long as the Sparkasse isn't in charge of the transfer I'd say such a heist will be too difficult for the usual suspects.
I'd argue that the or at least one major reason for the downfall of Stackoverflow (and not just a catalyst) has been a surge of Indian IT people triggering an avalanche of extremely low quality questions and answers. I've been a big fan of SO since about 2010. Not just didn't mind the harsh moderation but actually attribute to it learning how to properly ask a question. But at some point round about 2019/2020 it stopped being fun due to it going from knowledge base to garbage dump.
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