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Comment by ppod | Hacker News Reader

I do understand the pushback on Wolfram's egotism and self-branding stuff, but he is absolutely wonderful to listen to and still comes across as a bit of a genius. I think history will be kind to him.

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He has done what many of us want to achieve. Billion dollar SW company that is privately owned, that now enables him to pursue his intellectual interests.

What's absolutely admirable is that he managed to start a successful business in scientific computing. That's no easy feat.

I beg to differ. I think that in the current era, where there is a lot of live footage of people and uncurated writings like twitter, the stature of 'the genius' will inevitably be reduced. Consider someone like Newton where everything we know is very filtered, and compare to say Richard Dawkins' twitter feed where he says random stuff that is sometimes ill-considered and posts pictures of his broken windscreen. Elon Musk is probably another example.

This is probably a good thing overall, seeing this juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane.

The internet would have not reduced the stature of Ramanujan and Von Neumann in any way. See Terry Tao for an example.

Musk and the word genius have absolutely nothing to do with each other. He got rich from daddy’s bloody emerald mine, sells himself as a self-made billionaire and pays for his image (buying the title CEO of tesla, etc), without putting anything behind, other than his true self, a whiny scammer.

I really don't get it, there are lots of company owners that aren't any different from him, yet some communities have an axe to grid regarding him, and not other businesses.

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