I'm always reminded of a study of empirical music tastes: the scientists wanted to to determine if there was some kind of intrinsic property to music that would naturally be reveal in the lab. So they created some generic music, split people into groups: one where people could see each other's choices and one where they couldnt; and they ran this several times with different people over and over.
The only thing that elevated music was when people could see others choices and select music just snowballed to popularity.
Most of reality is shaped like that. Once you see that Elon musk was just in the right asshole location, then you can release the shackles of the "meritocracy" that obscures just random chance and personality choices.