Intelligence when you are moving fast is like energy and it helps you move faster.
You would likely get the first part for free if your parents managed to amass that kind of fortune.
The second part is just success bias over a large enough population.
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.
Because loads of people have a leg up, and go absolutely no where.
You need intelligence, social skills, hard work, privilege, and a complete lack of morals.
You do not need a lack of morals to succeed.
And privilege is not a precursor for success either, it just helps, and as others have said, very much does not guarantee anything.
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.”
He says his father invested 20k or so in his business, again very little by comparison.
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.
[0] https://www.imeche.org/news/news-article/'serious-engineerin...
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.
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.
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.