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.