It is wrong to conflate economic success with intelligence.
It’s silly to think that Elon isnt incredibly talented and smart in some ways. That doesn’t mean he’s universally talented and smart.
EVERYBODY is "incredibly talented and smart in some ways".
Most people are average, many are below average.
If you were to enumerate every skill that improves the life of at least one human, there are probably more than 10 billion such skills which require complex analysis, deep experience, and aptitude to execute at a high level. That's enough for everyone to have something they're "best" at.
One of my favorite quotes is: "If you judge a dolphin by its ability to fly, you are the idiot."
If you're speaking of "generalized intelligence", i.e. some metric which collapses the dimensionality to just a few axes, then obviously you start seeing a more classic distribution where many people are "dumber" than you. But you'd still lack many, many life skills necessary to comfortably take over their life were you to magically swap places with them.
The curse of dimensionality doesn't imply all skills are equal, only that finding meaningful exceptions in high dimensional data by just data analysis is hard, but we as a society don't find and filter for exceptionality in a data driven way like that, we have a very limited set of dimensions we assign to "success" (financial means being a big one). Someone making a great cardboard bed on the street will never be one of those dimensions.
Not even remotely true. At best, most humans are good at something. Not exceptional. That's massively rare.
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
I'm sorry, but most people have nothing, even the tiniest exceptional thing, about them. There's no latent kingfu master, hidden in pandas.
Then there's the objectivist train wherein no expectations are allowed, one must duly profess their ignorance and make baseless measurements in estimation and comment on the distribution of faculties per individual and the degree of resolution to which these measurements are allowed to take place - and it isn't to the degree which any great conclusions can be drawn, I assure you. There is no means by which you can splay out a person's whole and examine them. Time spent with one or two is time spent neglecting some other specimen. Not to mention the interference added by environment. And even in the best of cases that time spent may only be revelatory of some minute fraction of the whole, where again only some shallow conclusions may be drawn and they're only conclusive insofar as the observer has decided they are at some point in the context of time and space within their ever-evolvong system because there's hardly a tape measure suited to the infinite degrees of freedom that exist in the world.
Just look into the endless pit of nothingness, the void that is a myriad of vacant, rent-by-the-hour hotel rooms, that is the average person's eyes!
There is nothing there. I think they're all chatgtp clones!
The remaining what 4 billion people that are below the average person can easily be worse at everything then the 4 billion above the average person.
After all, if I am to believe what Mercier and Sperber are saying in "The Enigma of Reason", reasoning evolved not as a tool to find the truth and make good decisions but as a social tool - to convince others to cooperate with you, to justify your actions in front of the others, to secure your social status. If your cultish following showers you with cheers no matter what you say or do (especially if you label your critics by that label that your followers hate - woke, ideological, racist, censors, or whatever), how can you not lose contact with reality?
That is the simplified version of my explanation for the phenomenon of previously really successful people saying and doing borderline insane stuff. I could name 10 famous people in the last 3 years that IMO fit that pattern.
And do you think an 80 IQ founder == 120 IQ founder all else being equal?
Founders aren't the ones with the money. They're making it for someone else and then being paid for that.
In any case, it's what happens on average that matters, not minuscule exceptions. Money makes money.
Musk and Bezos seem to have come to roughly similar outcomes, so evidence suggests yes.
I don't think its possible, or fair, to reduce success to a single digestible dimension.
And somone had to come out the winner in a stochastic Market. It just halpened to be Musk. No competence requirer, at all.
elmu's current wealth is owed in large part, perhaps the most, to wealth he received from his rich, apartheid African jewel mine owning parents: that is the money with which he was able to get the rest of the money
If I had multiplied the advantage provided by my upbringing in the same way that Musk had, I'd be massively wealthy (but not nearly as wealthy). From a relative perspective, Musk is still a massive success.
I haven't come close. I'm ahead in some ways and behind in others.
though, don't get down on yourself and where you started vs. where you are: the relationship obviously isn't linear: the richer you are, the easier it becomes to turn 1 dollar into 2 dollars, especially when your family is wealthy, too
I definitely would have not done that. I am not that ambitious and I guarantee I would have been happy to achieve practically nothing while enjoying the comforts of my upbringing.
I understand and acknowledge that, and tried to account for it in the full sentence, of which you only quoted half. The relevant portion is italicized below:
> if someone (perhaps, self-admittedly, not you) had been gifted the wealth elmu was, they could have turned it into more wealth the way elmu has
If everyone had the exact same head start he did (or didn't, it seems disputed), we all wouldn't have achieved what he has. Just because he had a head start that we would all have liked to have doesn't mean we all could have accomplished what he has.
It'd be like dismissing an MLB pitcher throwing a perfect game because his parents could afford to send him to private coaches.
why would it? You aren't everybody, or anybody else but you, so saying you wouldn't want to do it doesn't really have any affect on the point (especially since we're discussing ability, not ambition)
How much wealth was he gifted with? Order of magnitude would be a sufficient response.
I'm going on memory here, from what I read/heard online. I think people just want to write him off, tbh.
But I give him credit for scale and gtm. I just think he doesn’t get social software
There was zero way Twitter could have survived on the path it was going; if not for drastic changes he instituted - mainly in dramatically cutting costs and overhead - they would have been dead anyway. They are no longer bleeding. They have lots of debt, thus they still need to do something new to pay it off, but at least they aren't accruing more debt like they were before.
Twitter was a niche player anyway - it was disproportionately used by techies but was far from having a broad penetration so why not move in a bold, new direction? Its current model is already known to be untenable long term - even before Elon bought them.
The real issue is ads are no longer going to be enough to sustain the tech giants (ads were mostly a scam of bot farmed clicks, over promised results, etc.). I wouldn't worry about Twitter now X - it will survive, whether this crowd feels it's for them or not. What I'm really interesting in seeing is how Google, Facebook and others are going to remain relevant. In the near term I would expect layoffs to accelerate since that's the lowest hanging fruit for these companies, but at some point they are likely going to have to come up with something more substantial and of actual value.