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Have you considered the possibility that someone you regard as extremely intelligent is speaking from real-life experience and direct proximity when they say another person is smart?
Or perhaps your bias toward Musk make that impossible to even consider.
In hindsight, it's easy to assess that Gates was a charming moron, Jobs was an overeager egoist, and that Altman is a sociopathic liar. All of the white knights defending their boy genius narrative are contradicted by their asinine philosophies, and in Elon's case he's simply undermined by all of his broken promises, random accusations and manic paranoia.
From all the interviews and stuff that came out within the past few years, its pretty clear that Musks only contribution to anything is just throwing money at stuff while also scamming suppliers, governments, and so on. The dude has no technical knowledge of his own, he just lies and lies about what actually happens, and takes credit for accomplishments that aren't his.
When you hear someone who is supposedly smart talk about a dumb person like he is smart, it raises questions on whether that person that is doing the talking is actually smart.
edit: typo
b) Musk has made crazy amount of promises and predictions, none of which turned out to be true, and his history is full of dumb ideas and decisions. He literally drove a truck to the Twitter server location, and started ripping out servers, despite people telling him that it will break stuff, and then when it broke stuff, he was like oh, you are right. Is that indication of someone intelligent?
c) Intelligence is not separable by topic. There are no smart people that are conservatives. There are conservatives who remember a whole bunch of technical information and appear to be smart, but information recall is not intelligence. Being able to analyze reality and determine what is true is not is a core skill, and if you apply that to politics or social issues, you end up pretty much center left in terms of political spectrum. Musk is solely on the far right. Someone who is so convinced in his conspiracy theories absolutely does not have the mental machinery to correctly parse technical topics.
But I don't think it's fair to say Elon is stupid / a bad engineer. When John Carmack speaks well of his talent, I take that seriously.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4. Watch this video and tell me if he speaks like an intelligent person.