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yes, there are plenty
more recent example, every single person who touched epstein
Around the turn of the century a company called Enron collapsed in an accounting scandal so meteoric it also took down Arthur Anderson (there used to be be a Big Five). Bad, bad fraud, buncha made up figures, bunch of shady ties to the White House, the whole show.
Enron was helmed by Jeff Skilling, a man described as "incandescently brilliant" by his professors at Wharton. But it was a devious brilliance: it was an S-Tier aptitude for deception, grandiosity, and artful rationalization. This is chronicled in a book called The Smartest Guys in The Room if you want to read about it.
Right before that was the collapse of Long Term Capital Management: a firm so intellectually star studded the book about that is called When Genius Failed. They almost took the banking system with them.
The difference between then and now is that it took a smarter class of criminal to pull off a smaller heist with a much less patient public and much less erosion of institutions and norms. What would have been a front page scandal with prison time in 1995 is a Tuesday in 2025.
The new guys are dumber, not smarter: there aren't any cops chasing them.
I see no evidence that great mathematicians or scientists or genre-defining artists or other admired abd beloved intellectual luminaries with enduring legacies or the recipients of the highest honors for any of those things skew narcissistic or with severe empathy deficits or any of that.
Brilliant people seem to be drawn from roughly the same ethical and moral distribution as the general public.
If you're not important to someone powerful, lying, cheating, stealing, and generally doing harm for personal profit will bring you to an unpleasant end right quick.
But the longer you can keep the con going, the bigger the bill: its an unserviceable debt. So Skilling and Meriwether were able to bring down whole companies, close offices across entire cities.
This is by no means the worst case though, because if your institutions fail to kick in? There's no ceiling, its like being short a stock in a squeeze.
You keep it going long enough, its your country, or your entire civilization.
You want the institutions to kick in before that.
also, great for the Wall Street, mixed bag for us the people
Neither necessary nor sufficient.
There are many things we can and should say about Zuckerberg, but I don't think that unintelligent is one them.
Partially related documentary [1]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Xxi0b9trY [video][44 mins]
Once you achieve wealth it gives you the opportunity to make more bets many of which will fail.
The greater and younger the success the more hubris. You are more likely to see fools or people taking bad risks when they earned it themselves. They have a history of betting on themselves and past success that creates an ego that overrides common sense.
When you inherit money you protect it (or spend it on material things) because you have no history of ever being able to generate money.
HN is "the smart reddit" as my brother coined, and i'm very aware of how much nonsense is on here, but it is in a relative sense true.
All to say, blindly bashing the role of a leader seems faulty and dismissive.
Not to say that Zuckerberg is dumb but there's plenty of ways he could have managed to get where he is now without having the acumen to get to other places he wants to be.
I'm sure that Zuck is worthy of huge amounts of criticism but this is a really silly response.
That doesn't tell me anything about his ability to build "augmented reality" or otherwise use artificial intelligence in any way that people will want to pay for. We'll see.
Ford and GM have a century of experience building cars but they can't seem to figure out EVs despite trying for nearly two decades now.
Tesla hit the ball out of the park with EVs but can't figure out self-driving.
Being good at one thing does not mean you will be good at everything you try.
Your EV knowledge is 3 years out of date. Both Ford and GM have well liked and selling EVs. Meanwhile Tesla's sales are cratering.
While I cannot remember the names of these sites, there were various attempts to create a shared platform website where you could create a profile and communicate with others. I remember joining a few at least back in 2002 before MySpace, Yahoo360. There was also Bebo which, I think, was for the younger kids of the day.
Lets not forget about friendsreunited.
Many Companies become successful being at the right place at the right time. Facebook is one of those companies.
Had facebook been created a year or so beforehand (or a year or two after) we would likely be using some other "social media" today. Be interesting how that would have compared to facebook. Would it be "more evil" ???
Regardless, whether its Facebook/MarkZuckerberg or [insert_social_media]/[owner]... we would still end up with a new celebrity millionnaire/billionnaire.. and would still be considered "a fool" one way or another.